what’s the most unreasonable thing you’ve ever been asked to do at a job?

by Alison Green on October 21, 2021

On the recent post about office supply drama, several people shared stories of wildly unreasonable things managers have asked them to do. For example:

•  “I temped for a small NFP and the director was bananas. She was filthy rich (like own private jet and multiple homes rich); her husband owned a hedge fund, which funded the family foundation, which contributed heavily to the NFP, which was a pet project of hers. … She asked the mail room person to call the post office to see if they could deliver the mail earlier in the day. In NYC. She legit thought the post office would/should change its route for her.”

•  “I had a boss who, the day after he learned we’d not had our grant renewed decided that he would have us work with some incredibly gnarly diseases. So his first step is to come to my desk with a hand-written list and ask me to email our animal facility about using these (very scary) things there. And he just stood there watching me type, so I couldn’t even start the email with, ‘Hey, sorry to ask this, my boss wants to know if we can use hanta virus in the facility.’

So I send the email, my boss leaves and I sprint down the street to the animal facility to apologize for asking and to beg them to say ‘no.’ (Of course they were going to say no, this was like serious BSL3 stuff.)”

(Of course, nothing can ever reach the levels of the boss who made someone leave a note at an employee’s relative’s grave.)

So: What’s the most unreasonable thing you’ve ever been asked to do at a job? And did you do it? Share in the comment section.

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  1. Sleepy Time Tay*

    Ooooo, I’m grabbing a cozy blanket, some popcorn, and camping out in the comments section.

      1. Daune*

        Told to change time clock records or I would be fired. I was 5 months pregnant, so I did because I was terrified of losing my job and insurance. Funny thing is I forwarded all those to my personal email and only had to wait 6 months for the class action lawsuit to be filed. I helped the lawyers win their case with the paper trail. I quit shortly after my kid was born. And never went back into management.

    2. MeridianShrill*

      I know! Like, ugh, c’mon! This was posted a whole 5 minutes ago, where are the juicy stories???

    5. EPLawyer*

      Arrrgh wish I could. But I have a hearing and a brief to work on (not the same case obviously). UGGGGH.

    7. SeluciaMD*

      Any time these kinds of posts go up, my brain immediately goes “Ginger, get the popcorn!” It is moment’s like this I wish we could add GIFs to our comments. :)

        1. SeluciaMD*

          Solidarity! I’m still cranky about how they did Toby dirty in the final season. #justicefortoby

      1. Katefish*

        This isn’t something I was asked to do, but someone else was. I used to work with a manager with questionable judgment in general. He had a pornographic ring tone (exactly what you’re picturing). He left his phone panting and moaning in the office while he stepped out, and the manager below him was asked to go silence it, which she did.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          I feel like that’s a very reasonable ask in the situation, followed by “and please also take a promotion to his level, we just fired him.”

      2. Kuddel Daddeldu*

        My office frequently had visitors from HQ. They invariably wanted to visit the famous Reeperbahn entertainment district and particularly the Salami Bar, an outfit, since closed, that took “live act” very, very seriously. I was tasked to take them there and be a tour guide/chaperone for managers twice my age and a dozen pay grades above mine.
        After a few visits, young assistant manager me had a roll of almost 500 complimentary entrance tickets to said establishment on my desk, given to me by the doorman. You can imagine the checks…

      3. alicia.x.*

        Ok omg I actually have one. I was being supervised by a horrible, lazy, dumb supervisor. We’ll call her Cherrie. Cherrie was genuinely awful at her job. She came in late, left early, spent most of her time in the office socializing, was totally uninterested in keeping up with developments in our field, and was absolutely petrified of bearing any responsibility for anything, so she wouldn’t give me advice about what to do in any situation, she’d just basically march me into our executive director’s office and ask the ED what to do. It’s crazy that she still had a job, but it was a nonprofit organization and she was married to the deputy director aka the second in command.

        In the beginning, the problems with Cherrie weren’t super noticeable to me because I was so new. But as I got more competent, her lack of competence became increasingly clear. As I was given more responsibilities, I had to work longer hours and get better organized, and her lack of organization and short work hours drove me crazy. Even if she happened to be in the office when I had a question, she couldn’t (or wouldn’t, because that would mean assuming some responsibility for the outcome) answer it.

        I started seriously looking for new jobs. The ED got wind of my job search, and had a meeting with me about what was bothering me and what they could do to convince me to stay. I laid out the supervisory hellscape nightmare I was living in. I was like, I’m here for 8+ hour days, every day, working Saturdays. My supervisor literally works 4 hour days, maybe 4 days a week. She won’t answer my questions when she’s here, which isn’t often. I routinely have to take over her cases when she can’t manage them anymore, and I end up taking on additional projects (think: trainings, outreach) because she gets assigned to them, then can’t manage her time, so I have to do it.

        The ED of our organization said: yeah, I know, I have no respect for her as a [teapot producer]. If I could, I would have let her go years ago. But the Deputy Director (her spouse) knows about all these things at our org and nobody else could do DD’s job, and DD also happens to be the HR director (because we were such a small org) and DD will never sign off on firing Cherrie.

        So the ED came up with a solution. It would “hurt Cherrie’s feelings” if I was assigned to a new supervisor. So the ED of our org instructed me to continue to meet with Cherrie as if she was still my supervisor, knowing that those meetings would be absolutely pointless. But, I was secretly being assigned a new supervisor. I could meet with new supervisor, but I would either need to wait until late in the day after DD went home, or meet with new supervisor outside of the office… because new supervisor’s office was NEXT TO DD’s office, and DD would figure out what’s up, get mad, and tell Cherrie.

        That’s right, I was instructed by the ED of our org to have a fake and useless supervisor, then physically leave the office to meet with my new shadow supervisor to spare Cherrie’s feelings and escape the wrath of DD. I left the org about a year after that, and now work in a functional workplace for significantly more money, and my only regret is not leaving sooner.

    10. Working Hypothesis*

      Absolutely!! I like this kind of call for anecdotes in general, but this is looking to be one of the best ever.

      Thanks, Alison!!

    11. Res Admin*

      I was in my early 20’s. First big time job as an executive assistant to a VP. VP went out on extended medical leave so I was asked to help out some high level consultants that had been brought in. Their demands were…interesting (to say the least).

      The most memorable, however, was when one of the young hotshots (from a big NYC consulting firm) decided to grow a beard. He didn’t know how to trim it. My mistake was to tell him to just go to the store and pick up a beard trimmer. (duh!) He wanted me to go buy him one and basically act as his barber. I declined. He was shocked. I ended up telling him that if he was old enough to have a beard, he was old enough to figure out how to care for it.

      4. MassChick*

        Wow. I wouldn’t have much confidence in a consultant who couldn’t manage his own (completely optional) beard.

        1. DJ Abbott*

          Ahh, consultant mills. When I was temping in the 90s, and I also had a neighbor who was doing this, there were large well respected companies that hired young men straight out of college to be consultants.
          The job required almost constant travel, and my understanding was they got a little bit of training before they were sent all over the country.

      5. Journalist Wife*

        I am thinking back to the early-20s-age “professional me” in first big time job, and my ruefully naive understanding of what one has to do to please others, especially when filling in/temping for my absent Big Boss, despite firm knowledge of all the things actual Big Boss wouldn’t have been *asked* to do, let alone agree to do…and I have this awful suspicion that I genuinely would’ve just tried my best to give that beard a trim because I was scared shitless of the Good Old (and sometimes Younger) Boys’ network at large in my line of work, and let myself be walked all over in virtually any way they thought up. Kudos to you for your response!!! (And shame on me for knowing I’d have been way too cowardly to say that to them. Not sure what I would’ve done, but I’m certain it at least would’ve involved my spending my own gas money/mileage to drive to get them a damn beard trimmer and hoping to God I was reimbursed very soon.)

    13. academics, man*

      I’m sure there will be many more unreasonable than mine, but what immediately came to mind was the time my boss asked me to take photos of him in his office for his dating app profile, which turned into me helping him write and set up said profile.
      Why yes, my boss was an older man and I was a younger woman, why do you ask?

        1. Vegetarian Raccoon*

          “Just because you’ll be much younger than me, doesn’t keep me from expecting you to be my mom/babysitter!”

    14. DoggoMom*

      Not an office setting, but back when I was in school I worked as a server at a restaurant. I’d caught strep throat (actually from another server they pressured to work) so I went to my doctor, was diagnosed, and given a work excuse because strep throat is super contagious. So I call the restaurant, can barely talk because my throat is inflamed, and tell them I’m not coming in that night or the next. The general manager then tells me to come in or I’m fired. I tell her I have strep throat and have an excuse because it’s so contagious so I should not be around people’s food. She tells me again to come in or I’m fired. I tell her I’m not coming in, hang up. I wasn’t fired. She knew if she fired me for not violating health code they’d be in so much hot water. But how she handled it was exactly why I’d caught strep throat from another server. That server was a single mom so she couldn’t risk it, came in anyway (and then complained the whole shift that she felt awful because she had strep.) Honestly, should have reported them anyway, but a few months later the place closed anyway.

      1. Kat*

        I worked at a hotel in the catering department and had a very similar experience. I was extremely ill, couldn’t talk and had a note from health services. They said it would count as an occurrence even though I called in. I quit pretty much a week later.

      2. Ozzie*

        This is a weird parallel…

        Not recently, but when I was a barista, I caught strep (no idea where from), could barely stand up at work to finish my shift. Went to the doctor, diagnosed, excuse from work, etc. Called the store and talked to the manager, told her I had strep and wouldn’t be in – and she asked “You can’t work?” To which I responded, of course, “No, I’m highly contagious.” Naturally I didn’t get paid for the days I missed, but at least some was over a weekend/happened to be a Monday holiday (so I wasn’t getting paid anyway/wasn’t scheduled as a result).

        Wild, what managers try to do…

        1. Katefish*

          I forgot about this, but back when I was a barista my manager was upset that I was a few hours late for work because I was in the ER with an asthma attack. He was like, Why can’t you come in now? I gently explained that not being able to breathe might hinder work.

          1. Barbara Eyiuche*

            When I was a teacher in Asia, the school managers and owners really did not accept illness as a reason not to come to work. At one school in Taipei I phoned in sick because I was coughing up blood – I had tuberculosis, but had not yet been diagnosed. The director was annoyed and kept asking why I couldn’t come in. ‘You mean you can’t talk? You have laryngitis?’ I kept trying to explain that yes, I could still talk, but I was coughing up blood.
            At a school in South Korea I had gone in to work even though I was having a miscarriage. I started bleeding so heavily that I decided I had to leave. They kept on insisting I was fine and could finish out my shift.

      3. Working Hypothesis*

        I’m a massage therapist. We have a licensing requirement that we refrain from seeing clients for at least the duration of any contagious illness plus 24 hours.

        One time, my clinic had a new manager who came out of the business world and didn’t know a damn thing about massage. (Our owner was great, but she’d been trying to raise money in order to expand rapidly into new locations, and he’d been forced on her by the people she was borrowing from.) He decided to make a rule that he’d seen, and probably used, in other settings to keep people from taking sick days: if you were going to be out sick for more than 24 hours, you need a doctor’s note.

        This meant that, if we obeyed both his rule and our state’s ethics requirements, we would need to see a doctor every single time we were out for anything infectious, no matter how trivial or how brief. It couldn’t be done. The doctors in our city are largely swamped (even pre-Covid, which this was by several years), and there’s no way they would accept an appointment on their schedule from somebody who had a minor cold because their boss demanded a doctor’s note. So we had only two options: break the rule, or risk getting our licenses yanked for ethics violations.

        I pointed this out in an email thread on which was reading every therapist in the company, and asked him politely how he expected us to obey his rule without committing an ethics violation and losing our licenses — since I couldn’t figure out a way, myself.

        He was livid. I don’t think he knew before I said so that there was a conflict; and he sure as heck didn’t want the other therapists to notice that there was!!! He fired me as soon as he could send off a private email to me, saying so.

      4. Terrier Queen*

        Sorry for my ignorance, I’m from UK but I’m not sure what strep throat is? I certainly would never call in sick for a sore throat but I’m guessing it’s more like a flu or pneumonia if you need to avoid work? Is it known as something else over here?

        1. Splendid Colors*

          Strep throat is a highly contagious bacterial illness (streptococcus infecting the throat). I have no idea what it’s called in the UK but maybe “streptococcal infection” would be a good term to search.

  2. froodle*

    I worked in a call centre for one of the Big 5 UK energy companies. We had large bins on each floor, marked metal, paper, food waste, and misc. Our team had the bank of desks right next to the bins, and the call centre manager (essentially the boss of all 1000+ employees at that particular call centre) asked our supervisor if we would empty and sort through the “misc” bin in order to catch any recyclables which might have been incorrectly disposed of. Really said something about what this woman thought of the staff she managed.

    (my supervisor laughed, first because she assumed it was a joke, then laughed harder once she realised it wasn’t)

    (and no, we did not have to sort through garbage in the middle of the call centre floor while adhering to the office-casual dress code)

    1. Meep*

      OMG. I am all for recycling (and being green) while my older coworkers could give a flying hoot but this is too much and unsanitary. Really makes me feel glad the worst I have had to deal with was being expected to take out the trash as the only female engineer because they guys had “more important things to do” then walk their trash 100 yards to the dumpster apparently on top of acknowledging how demeaning it was… for them. And no, spending $25/week on a cleaning service was “too much” when they could pay me $30/hr to do it.

    2. GraceC*

      Did you accidentally inherit the letter writer who had a vendetta against the mystery office non-recycler?

    3. Amy the Rev*

      We had to do that as lifeguards at the beaches I worked at- dive through the trash bins to catch recyclables, dive into the recycling bins to catch redeemables and trash. You’d be surprised how many people threw dirty diapers into the recycling bins, and how many folks tossed bags of beer cans into the trash! At the end of the season, our boss would take us all out to (a local, delicious, and fairly pricey) breakfast with the money we got from redeeming all the cans/bottles, which was usually about $300-$400 total! At least trash duty was the end of our shift so we didnt have to sit in stinky clothes for hours afterwards…

      1. Elizabeth West*

        That reminds me; when I lived in California, there was a funny commercial about recycling. It started by slowly panning across several scary-looking guys in a police lineup. A woman’s voice said, “No….no….not him….no….” Then it stopped on a very meek, balding man in rumpled office clothes, and the woman screamed: “AAAAAHH! That’s him! That’s the man I saw throw a BOTTLE in the TRASH!”

        Immediately, all the scary dudes turned on him in disgust and went, “Ewww!” “You did WHAT!?” And the guy looked very sheepish and shrugged.

        It never failed to make me laugh! I tried to find it online but I couldn’t.

        1. Caliente*

          I absolutely giggled at the description! Although for the little guy I pictured the hapless green m&m who’s always getting yelled at by the grumpy yellow one :)

        2. alienor*

          My daughter was born and brought up in California, and recycling and water conservation were heavily emphasized at all the schools she attended. Well, a couple of years ago while we were on vacation in another state, she saw a man throwing a full water bottle away in a street garbage bin, and I thought she was going to have a stroke. She was around 19 or 20 at the time, so that early messaging really stays with you!

      2. Texan In Exile*

        Sadly, I would not be surprised at how many people throw dirty diapers into recycling bins. I’ve watched people change a baby’s diaper on a table in an airport food court. Nothing surprises me anymore.

        1. Artemesia*

          I still have nightmares about the dirty diaper I stepped in in a Rome parking lot and then got on the floor of the car and my purse —- At least the purse was a travel thing that was actually washable — it went through a complete washing machine cycle. But it was not a good start to a day trip. Human waste is so much more dangerous and contaminating than animal waste — urggghhhh. Awful. And awful that any employees would be expected to dig through garbage. urggghhhhh.

          1. Mimi*

            I have actually dug through garbage for work, but it was a thing that the sustainability committee voluntarily got ourselves into because the compost hauler was going to start throwing away our compost if we didn’t clean up the contamination, so we wanted to figure out what parts of the building needed better signage/design/something. (But it was absolutely a pain in the neck, and we didn’t do a great job of the audit, because there’s only so much you can do in the middle of a kitchen, in office clothes.)

        2. Nobby Nobbs*

          I’m pretty sure I’ve thrown a dog poop bag in a beach recycling bin before. In my defense, the cans were not well marked, which is why I’m only pretty sure.

        3. RetailSucks*

          I worked one holiday season at Macy’s and people would leave dirty diapers in the dressing room! (eye roll here)

      3. Azure Jane Lunatic*

        I had a gig for about a week standing guard on the bins at a tech company event to keep the waste streams clean / paper recyclables from being soaked with beverages. It was an experience. I managed to not get my safety neon yellow shirt dirty.

    4. Kate*

      This reminds me of a crazy crazy boss I had.
      On my last day I had filed, copied, given away everything the company needed to continue on without me. She then saw me take a bunch of other stuff, mainly personal or no longer needed, to the rubbish or the secure bins depending on what it was. Later that day she stood over me and demanded that I tell her which bins I used because she might need to go in and get it out because it was the “company’s property”.
      If Alison ever does another tell us wild and crazy stories of managers I will now have a lot to share.
      I never actually had to write in for advice because “your boss sucks and isn’t going to change” was the advice applicable.

    5. Software Eng*

      This reminds me of my tone at university IT support

      It was about ten years ago, and we had nice shredders in our office that would shred CDs so professors could bring us CDs they needed destroyed. One day somebody brought in a huge box full of floppy disks to be destroyed… not even the smaller ones I remember but the older, bigger ones.

      But of course our shredder could not handle the metal piece on the floppy and anyways these things would not fit in the CD slot. So we had to rip them apart by hands to take out the data film thing and shred that. We had college students doing this on and off for hours in between helping customers until somebody cut himself badly on one of the metal pieces and my boss said F this and threw it all in the trash as-is

      1. Snuck*

        Couldn’t they have just wiped them with a magnet? Stuck them in an oven (or the sun in a black trash bag)? Pretty sure those 5 inch floppies were reasonably fragile!

        1. Kuddel Daddeldu*

          Nah, they are actually quite robust.
          I had one without the sleeve. Worked well if you knew how to insert it. Had another one pinned up on my whiteboard (with a magnet!) that still worked.

          Once my boss told me to inventory our IT equipment across multiple offices. He insisted on totals; when I pointed out that a total af a wild mixture of printers, terminals, mobile phones, data cables (!), modems, PCs and monitors did not make much sense, he still wanted them. So I diligently totalled all columns. Whatever he made of the total of all serial numbers, I don’t know (nor care).

          Re floppy disks: I collected my share of weird looks when coworkers spotted me diligently photocopying a big stack of those. The reason? Documenting which software serial numbers went to which office – these were very long and printed onto the disks, so a xerox was both fast and reliable.

        2. Mimi*

          Magnets aren’t actually great for destroying data, at least, not the strength of magnets the average person has access to. A run-in with a magnet will wipe your keycard, sure, and if you’re unlucky it might make your computer unusable, but I wouldn’t trust one to make data on a hard drive irrecoverable unless I had the hard drive loose in front of me with the disks visible (and at that point, a hammer or drill press usually does a better job).

        3. MBK*

          Important data you need to keep is remarkably fragile. Sensitive data you need to destroy is amazingly durable. Even if they’re stored on the same media.

          1. Sharpie*

            In my British Army days, we frequently had to wipe hard drives. We’d take four or five at a time and set them up plugged into computer base units in a back room, overnight, with a program that would literally wipe and over-write the data down to the bit level, seven times (which was why it was done overnight!). More than once we came in the next morning to find it had stopped halfway through. If it failed a second time, the drive automatically got its classification upgraded to ‘secret’ which meant physically destroying the hard disk. Much fun but very hard to do because those things are remarkably tough – and I’m talking the hard drive found in the average PC back in the early 2000s rather than something specifically military grade.

    6. Emily*

      Where I work, we have volunteers that sort thru all the trash (mostly food service waste from about 5000 customers per day) and pick out anything that’s recyclable. They don’t even get paid for it. For real.
      The main difference being that our volunteers at least know that’s what they’re signing up for!

  3. Siege (The other one?)*

    It wasn’t unreasonable, but I did once have to get some damp towels for a guest that had a fish fall on him while staying with us. We were not a fish-related business.

      2. froodle*

        Seconded! Was the origin of the miscreant fish ever identified? Or was the guest intruding on fish territory and got his fishy desserts?

        1. Siege (The other one?)*

          Hahaha, it wasn’t the fishes fault! I worked for a very big company in the swamplands of central Florida, to give you an idea. What we think happened is a bird caught a fish but then couldn’t hold it, so it dropped the fish on the guest while he was exiting our ride.

          2. mqs*

            Oh wow! The same thing happened to my husband’s car. A giant fish got dropped on it… in Houston…. in August… several hours before it was found. The whole car was covered in baked on exploded fish. We were still finding tiny fish bones in the door gaskets weeks later!

              1. NoviceManagerGuy*

                Sort of a self-perpetuating problem with all the seagulls that would make friends with the car.

              2. mqs*

                He managed to get it cleaned up pretty well, pretty fast. I think it was at least 3 runs through a car wash plus handwashing that night at home. He has terrible luck with cars: things falling out of the truck in front and he can’t swerve out of the way, getting t-boned while parked on a residential street, etc. This was by far the funniest though!

            2. Thursdaysgeek*

              You need to google and watch the newscast about the “Oregon Exploding Whale”. It isn’t completely clear in that newscast, but the car that was hit was a new one.

              3. Tigersmom*

                The reporter from that story, Paul Linnman, wrote a book about it (the whale story is interpersed with the story of his life – it’s pretty interesting). I met him at a book signing by Oregon authors at the State Capitol so got to talk to him a bit. The book is called “The Exploding Whale and other remarkable stories from the evening news/”

              5. Anhaga*

                In case anyone skims past this and thinks “THEY DID WHAT TO A WHALE”, know that the whale was already long dead, and this was merely an utterly inadvisable way to get rid of the very large, very smelly carcass.

                1. Worldwalker*

                  There’s something about extremely dead whales … look up the one that exploded without any help in Taiwan.

                2. allathian*

                  Once putrefaction starts, whales can explode without any human intervention. I bet those who set the explosives didn’t figure the amount right, because the putrefying internal organs and their contents no doubt contributed to the explosion.

              10. TGOTAL*

                Oh man. I remember downloading that video on my dialup connection 25 years ago. It took all night.

                And it was absolutely worth it.

            3. NoMoreOffice*

              Never had a fish dropped on my head, but I was crouched down looking at a jewelry display and the shop cat fell off the edge of the case and landed on my head. Claws out of course. I couldn’t even be mad because it’s not like the cat did it on purpose.

              2. DesertRose*

                Many a year ago, when I was still married to my ex-husband, we had two cats, a fairly chill tabby and a very sweet but impish tortie.

                One Sunday afternoon, I was reading on the couch while erstwhile husband was playing video games. Because we were just hanging around the house, he was not wearing a shirt. He paused his game and went into the kitchen to refill his tea.

                And then I hear a godawful yell.

                That silly tortoiseshell cat had gotten on top of the refrigerator and jumped on his head/shoulders when he opened it looking for the tea pitcher. She was a petite kitty, so he had a mere six pounds of cat on his head–but he still had a cat on his head. She looked very pleased with her practical joke.

              3. lailaaaaah*

                I was at my cousin’s baby shower + was grabbing some stuff from a kitchen cupboard when one of their cats slipped off the counter and landed on my back, claws out- upon which I instinctively jerked and launched the poor thing onto the floor by the far wall. She’s been a lot more skittish with me since then.

              4. Michelle*

                I used to be a non-drinker, and had some friends who were very unsupportive and pushy about trying to get me to drink. Two of them were getting married — an outdoor wedding — and at the reception they insisted it would be rude of me to refuse champagne for the toast. I tried to get Sprite, but I was young and everyone kept saying I was being rude, so I accepted the glass. And then, in the middle of the toast, a huge caterpillar dropped from an over-hanging tree directly into my glass. Everyone was convinced I somehow did it on purpose, but it got me out of drinking the champagne!

            4. Working Hypothesis*

              My dad told me a story decades ago about a small airplane that was forced to make an emergency landing because it was hit squarely on the windshield by a codfish… at several hundred feet up!! An eagle had evidently caught the fish and dropped it while flying it away to its nest. The insurance claim report for that incident must have been epic.

                1. Working Hypothesis*

                  Oh wow, not small at all then! I think I mentally inserted that part myself, assuming it must have been; now that I see the article, I’m remembering that my dad may have just said it was a plane. :)

    2. Supernonymous*

      I once had a leaf blower fall on my head. Indoors. While I was getting a roll of toilet paper for the public bathroom. I had a concussion that took months to clear up. And this was not a business that sold or bought leaf blowers, it was just the leaf blower we had for our own leaf blowing needs.

      I had to remind staff multiple times after that not to put the leaf blower on top of that cabinet…..

      2. Penny Hartz*

        Omg, after the leaf blower fell and gave someone a concussion, other employees STILL had to be reminded not to put it on a cabinet? Yikes. I hope you are all right and have fully healed!

      3. Awesome Sauce*

        A former co-worker had one of those roll-up projector screens come loose from its mounts and fall on their head once. Needless to say it was a topic of discussion at the workplace OSH committee meetings for months afterward.

        1. The Prettiest Curse*

          I once had a bookshop browsing session rudely interrupted by a shelf that was overloaded with calendars crashing to the floor and (mostly) missing my feet. If I’d been closer or wearing less sturdy boots, I would have definitely broken something.

        2. MigraineMonth*

          I was helping my college theater department tear down their set when one of the large theater lights fell off the catwalk and hit the set. Fortunately I was under the set at the time, but it became a real teachable moment about how the (extremely expensive) lights should never be left on the catwalk.

          1. Princesss Sparklepony*

            That sounds like a murder mystery plot! Was there anyone underneath the area that was hated by someone….

        3. Rob aka Mediancat*

          I had a toilet paper dispenser land on my left foot — one of those jumbo public restroom sized dispensers. It literally came off the wall when I tried to get some paper. I limped for a week.

          1. Ann Onymous*

            My mom was in a public restroom when the cover fell off the big toilet paper dispenser and hit her in the head.

        4. Susan Ivanova*

          I was at just the right time and place to catch a glass shelf full of collectibles in a shop once when the shelf support collapsed. If I’d tried to move, all the breakables would’ve fallen off it, so I was stuck there until the shop employees noticed. My mom was in line so she didn’t see me until later, and she was all “why did you do that? You could’ve gotten cut by the glass shelf” but it was just reflex.

        5. lailaaaaah*

          We have digital display screens in every classroom and hall in our school except one, where the teacher has adamantly refused (it’s the chapel, he thinks it would be sacreligious). Last week, when I was setting up the projector screen he has instead, it collapsed and almost landed on a group of students. I think the teacher in question has started to see the benefits of the display screen idea now.

      4. FairestCat*

        Concussions are the worst!

        It was as a volunteer rather than as an employee, but last December I managed to give myself a concussion trying to shove a resentful tomcat into a carrier, and I’m still dealing with the aftereffects.

    3. Tiffany Aching*

      I also have a fish story from a non-fish-related business! As a student I worked in my university’s library at the circulation desk, and on the last day before winter break of my freshman year, another student came in with a beta fish in a bowl. He said that as the dorms were closing for the break and he was flying home, he needed to do something with this pet fish and he’d heard that “the library takes fish.”
      I was so confused about what to do but the other student employee at the desk — a senior who’d worked in the library for years — just shrugged and took the fish.
      When our supervisor came back from her lunch she was flabbergasted [the library also closed during the break, so it’s not like anyone would be there to take care of the fish]. Going forward it was a part of new employee training that library does not, in fact, take fish.

      1. Coenobita*

        I volunteered at my local library when I was in high school, and one of my (self-assigned) duties was to take care of the beta fish at the children’s desk! I’m pretty sure the fish was brought in on purpose, though, and not just left there by a patron.

        1. Artemesia*

          What are the odds that someone in a library that was assumed to take fish would post in a column read by someone with a library that does have a beta fish?

          1. Chase*

            Higher than you think, actually! (From another library worker whose library hosts a beta fish who lives at the children’s desk.)

          2. Mimi*

            I think it must be pretty common for libraries to have fish (even though you’d think tanks of water would not be desirable). My library when I was a kid had beta fish at the children’s desk, too.

      3. Mr. Shark*

        Haha, I can imagine years down the road when someone is reading the employee handbook and it says, “The library does not take fish” and being blown away by how ridiculous that is!

        1. Artemesia*

          Don’t use the hairdryer while sleeping. You know there is a story and lawsuit behind that warning.

          1. Princesss Sparklepony*

            I’m thinking that might have come about when those portable inflatable bonnet type hairdryer units were popular. You set your hair in curlers, popped on the bonnet that looked like a big shower cap, and turned on the unit which blew air (hot or cold depending on the dial) into the bonnet to dry your hair. The blower unit was portable so you could grab it and walk around a bit. Not a lot since there was still a plug attached, but it wasn’t like the old ones in the beauty salon that were stationary or the ones that were smaller units that looked like domes when packed up. The hard ones would have been harder to fall asleep under but it could be done, though you would likely slump down if you fell asleep and it would just blow hot air on the top of your head maybe…

            1. Retired (but not really)*

              The bonnet ones made it possible to actually sleep with brush rollers in your hair!

          2. Rufus Bumblesplat*

            My sister took a train where there was a notice by the power sockets. It said that you were welcome to plug in and charge your phone or laptop, but please no hair dryers or toasters. She really wanted to know the story behind that one!

            1. Frequent Traveler*

              It’s almost certainly about how much power could be provided by the outlet, much like the “Electric shaver only” plugs in many hotels.

        2. BeckyinDuluth*

          My sister literally just told me a story about how they aren’t allowed to touch cats at work (she works in a large manufacturing plant with big doors, so sometimes animals get in) because once three years ago someone got scratched getting a cat out, it got infected, and then it became an OSHA reportable injury because they needed antibiotics. So now, no one is allowed to touch the cat. Which is walking on the product leaving cat prints, and otherwise living in the plant…no Animal Rescue in the area, and no advice from HR on what they are supposed to do with the cat that is living there.

          1. Jennifer Juniper*

            I would have been OK until I saw that cat.

            Then I would have picked up a towel or something and scooped the cat up for loves and pettings.

          2. LittleMarshmallow*

            Manufacturing plants often have pest control that would take care of that. If they don’t, I’m sure they could hire a one time pest control tech to trap the kitty and remove it from the premises. Also… we had the same rule at our plant for a similar incident…

        3. Ben*

          I am reminded of something I once heard from an aeronautical engineer – ‘every single stupid, redundant warning you see in the handbook is there because someone actually did that once.’

      5. Anne of Green Gables*

        I am laughing so hard at this! I can see this exact thing happening at my workplace–expect my library is at a community college with no housing. But a student just taking a fish and it ending up in the handbook, yup!

      6. bamcheeks*

        Ahh, this is lovely. Some of the rules you have to come up with when you work with students are brilliant.

        I worked as an RA during my postgrad degree, living in a halls of residence with about 800 undergraduates. I came home one day to find about 300 people having a party in the quad (the square grass space formed by buildings on three sides), including one guy who was juggling fire– clubs, bucket of propellent, actual fire, several hundred drunk undergraduates, including a girl standing near him who was saying, “no, seriously, can I just try? I just want a quick go!”

        I went over to him and introduced myself as the RA, and asked him to … not juggle fire. He was terribly polite and caught his clubs and said earnestly, “Oh — is is not allowed?” And I answered very honestly, “I’m not sure we’ve ever technically banned it, but we’re VERY strict on barbecues, so I’m sort of — extrapolating.”

        Fortunately, he decided that was good enough and took his BUCKET OF PETROL and FIRE away from all the drunk people. I am not quite sure what my second line would have been if hadn’t.

        1. bamcheeks*

          (Also I have just looked up “fuel for juggling fire” and apparently the Circus and Aerial Industry Blog is very strict that you should use kerosene/paraffin for juggling fire, not petrol, so I apologise for the inaccuracy.)

          1. Florp*

            I confess I was totally going to look that up. That right there is some miscellaneous research catnip.

          2. MelR*

            Yes, I was about to say that if he was actually using petrol, you probably stopped him just in time before things got crispy.

        2. Penguin-on-Fire*

          Safety 3rd as they say!
          In pre-pandemic times I would help fire safety for the fire spinners and props people at a few burn and festival events and the vast majority are pro safety.

          The main event I would volunteer for had rules around sobriety, fiber content of clothes you’re wearing and mandatory attendance to the safety meeting. Everyone abided by the rules and the most push back we ever got was people who missed the safety meeting even though it was posted that you had to attend it you wanted to spin conclave.

          Although this juggler sounds like he didn’t have a perimeter, safety or a proper dump station.

          1. Dragon_Dreamer*

            For those who wonder at the “fiber content” thing, we have the same rules for our English Civil War re-enactment group. We shoot muskets and cannons with black power. Basically, you have to have natural fibers when working with anything flammable.

            Natural fibers (wool, silk, cotton, linen, etc) smolder. Synthetics (polyester, spandex, etc) MELT. I’d rather have the smoldering cloth I can put out quickly next to my skin than the napalm of melted plastic.

            1. Nobby Nobbs*

              Apparently there is DRAMA in online knitting circles regarding whether you have to take into account “what happens if the baby catches on fire” when choosing yarn for a baby blanket, for this very reason.

              1. The Prettiest Curse*

                My mum does not knit, but this sounds exactly like the kind of thing she would worry about!

                And I suppose the online knitting community needed a new controversy now that the debate over knitting hats for the Women’s March has passed.

                1. ADHSquirrelWhat*

                  oh no, the drama about whether or not one can knit acrylic for the baby is a long-standing one. pretty much since the dawn of acrylic yarn, I’d assume.

                  personally, I figure anything that’s handwash only around babies is just asking for it, but hey, that’s just me!

                2. pancakes*

                  The Prettiest Curse, I’m not a knitter, but after reading a lengthy New Yorker article about Ravelry, I think that debate is still going in some corners of the internet.

              2. BubbleTea*

                My baby was recently diagnosed with eczema and is using some pretty heavy duty emollients. I’m very sad that it means I can’t take him to any Guy Fawkes Night bonfires. Too flammable :(

                1. batcat71*

                  aw! what if baby on fire became part of the celebrations? ohh.. saying that out loud, please ignore me. ^-^

            2. Penguin-on-Fire*

              Yup! I’d rather deal with wool sweater fuzzies catching and putting themselves out rather than potential burn with plastic.

              We’ve told people as counter intuitive as it is it’s better to go out in your birthday suit than in you spangled short shorts and sequin top if those are your only options.

            3. Pennyworth*

              Actually, cotton burns quite briskly, or at least a cotton shirt does. I have no experience with cotton sweaters.

              1. Anya*

                Synthetics burn at a higher temp, but usually melt before they ignite. Even if they don’t actually catch fire, the melt of the fabric can mess you up pretty bad. Natural fibers ignite at a lower temp, but they also tend to burn faster and will do less harm to your body than synthetics.

                Then there’s the toxicity factor – natural fibers burn pretty clean, while synthetics are mostly plastic based. Plastics release some nasty stuff when they melt/burn.

                Of course, trying to find ethically sourced natural fiber clothing that is affordable and sustainable is a trick unto itself.

                1. Artemesia*

                  Back in the days of panty house people were cautioned to not wear them in circumstances where fires might occur.

              2. Seven hobbits are highly effective, people*

                Sure, but cotton won’t try to melt and adhere to your skin while it burns like synthetics will. Synthetics came from goo, and will happily be goo again while also being on fire (and stuck to you).

              3. Drtheliz*

                The key is *how* it burns – a cotton shirt will burn up “whole” and you can yank it off yourself in a panic. A plastic one will melt to your skin, *then* burn.

                My school got a bit lax about apron rules in cooking class and tried jack o lanterns once. Kid leaned forward and lit his nylon t-shirt on fire. They tightened up the rules *real* fast after that, and you could see bandages under his collar for six months.

              4. RebelwithMouseyHair*

                Yes. In fact the very worst is a mix of cotton, to burn briskly, with plastic, that’ll then melt all the more quickly.
                And by plastic, we mean all synthetic fibres polyester polyamide acrylic nylon lycra spandex elastane creora gore-tex and all other fancy sounding fabrics.
                Get everybody in any given group to remove all synthetic fabrics from their body, and most people will end up very indecent if not stark naked (except me).

                1. Kal*

                  I have temperature regulation issues, so I try to find cotton clothes for almost everything so sweat can evaporate and heat can escape, but unfortunately because I have a female-shaped body, all of my shit is mixed with elastane. For some clothes it makes sense, but it is rather ridiculous how hard it is to find clothes for a female body that don’t have any synthetics in them at all. Like, even things that are supposed to be pretty shapeless somehow still have random synthetics added to the mix. Given the amount of downsides to synthetic fabrics, especially synthetic blends, it sucks how hard it can be to not have your home filled with synthetics.

          2. Admin of Sys*

            Oh, gosh, I wish my group had those sort of things. I was always the one trying to enforce perimeters and such w/ no help from my fellow burners. I finally left the group when one of the poi guys showed up on shrooms.

            1. Penguin-on-Fire*

              I got lucky in that at my first event the group running conclave was of the mindset “Safety 1st, 2nd and 3rd”, so I’ve always adopted that stance when doing perimeter or safety. We also basically showed up and said that we wanted to help fire safety for any events they ran which they loved because a group of 6 promised to show up sober and work one of the most boring jobs of the burn, perimeter.

              We now have a theme camp who’s focus is fire safety. We’ll come safety your theme camps event if you find us before beer o’clock. If you need help setting perimeter or need experienced safeties for conclave we promise to be there sober with our best duvees.

          3. DataSci*

            The one time I saw a friend juggling fire he had another friend – both of them completely sober – doing nothing but watching with a wet wool blanket to dump on him if he or anything else that shouldn’t be on fire caught fire. Even dry wool will take a long time to catch fire – wet wool will smother a small flame.

          4. Freya*

            I once saw a fire spinner set his own loincloth on fire while spinning the fire thingies. In retrospect, I’m glad that all of us drunk people abided by the perimeter requirements he set…

        3. KoiFeeder*

          You know, this isn’t actually my story, but I do hope that having to confiscate all the cleaning supplies out of my dorm after my roommate made mustard gas in the shared bathroom was the most unreasonable thing she had to do in her job.

          (student services decided that putting the germaphobe with the person with severely damaged intestines was a great idea, because we were both requesting a single for medical reasons. it was not a great idea.)

          1. calonkat*

            I always knew not to mix ammonia and bleach, but didn’t know that was literally mustard gas! I love learning things while being entertained (and I’ve had roommates like that as well).

            1. Worldwalker*

              It isn’t. Just chorine/chloramine gas, which is lethal enough in its own right, but it’s a different thing from mustard gas.

            2. Jennifer Juniper*

              I actually did that one time in college. I had the bright idea of cleaning the bathroom with bleach and cleanser at the same time. I started coughing, of course, but wasn’t in pain, so kept on cleaning the bathroom. Dad heard me hacking away, said “What the hell’s going on?” and shooed me out posthaste over my protests.

            3. Princesss Sparklepony*

              Two common household products mixed together make chloroform… Not that you would ever have need of that information………………………….. bleach and acetone.

            4. JustSomeone*

              My partner’s boss actually offered this as an honest-to-goodness sanitization tip during the very early days of covid when no one really knew what was going on and hand sanitizer/sanitizing wipes were impossible to get! At a mandatory all-employee meeting (small family company) about pandemic response, he suggested mixing ammonia and bleach to kill covid germs. My partner tells me he slowly raised his hand and strongly encouraged his coworkers not to do that.

              1. Splendid Colors*

                The macho young grad student TAs in a graduate biology class decided it was a good idea to mix bleach and detergent to clean contaminated glassware. I was less than tactful telling them to move stuff to a fume hood and evacuate the lab. They particularly didn’t want to hear it from a dorky middle-aged woman (returning student).

                Guess who got written up by the department? Yeah, not the ones who could’ve killed a bunch of students. The one who was insubordinate.

                So grateful I got out of that hellhole university.

          2. Your local password resetter*

            Thats an interesting train of logic from the services. The solution to problems that need extra space is to cram all the problems together and hope they cancel each other out?

            1. KoiFeeder*

              I should point out that it was functionally impossible to get an actual single unless you had an accompanying mobility disorder because all the students with disabilities were generally placed in the oldest resident hall, which was not ADA-compliant. So the “single” room that we got was basically one of the two person rooms with two walls shoved in to make “two singles” so small you had to turn sideways to squeeze past the bed, and a “common room” with the rest of the furniture.

            2. RebelwithMouseyHair*

              It’d be so that the people with problems that make them miserable only make each other miserable.

          3. MigraineMonth*

            Isn’t that chlorine gas, rather than mustard gas?

            Unfortunately, creating chlorine gas is common when using bleach + any acid (vinegar, ammonia, chlorine, etc).

            1. KoiFeeder*

              I was told it was mustard gas, but you’re right that it was far more likely to be chlorine gas.

              Either way, I had just come back from class and wasn’t allowed back into my dorm for six more hours.

        4. ladonnapietra*

          I once ran an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates program at a university in Idaho, and after the third year, I had to implement a “No driving to Alaska” policy. The short version: a lot of people from the East Coast do not realize 1) just how big Western states are, and 2) just how far you have to drive, including going through Canada, to get to Alaska.

          1. SweetFancyPancakes*

            A friend’s wife once insisted that you cannot drive to Alaska because it is an island. Then pulled out the US map from her planner (showing the time zones) to prove it- both Hawaii and Alaska were depicted in little boxes because, you know, they are not contiguous with the rest of the 48…

          2. K_TX*

            We had this same rule for our REU at my university in Texas except it was a “no undergrads using the department truck to drive to Mexico” policy. The main PI was sending 18-19 year olds to do field research driving trucks by themselves. This was ‘how they did it in the old days’ and they never told any admin or risk management until there was a accident and the university had to fly students back.

            We also had to have a vice provost come in and explain to all of our faculty that you could not try and skirt around the compliance/materials transfer paperwork for transporting samples to another university by having a grad student (who had been in the country for less than a year) take 5 buses to Illinois over a 24 hour period while holding a box of bacteria samples IN THEIR LAP, letting them stay in a co-PIs house for not one full night, and then asking them to take another 5 buses back. Our now former graduate chair thought it was fine because “the PI wanted to save money on flying the student there”, and “they don’t have time to worry about paperwork to do every little thing”

            1. Splendid Colors*

              I voluntarily brought my C. elegans cultures with me over winter break once while I was house-sitting. I needed to get away from school for a week, but didn’t want to restart my research after my cultures starved while nobody was there to take care of them. (I found out the hard way that my research results are inconsistent unless I pamper the heck out of my critters.) I brought my lab’s microscope, a bunch of agar plates, my tool to move nematodes, an alcohol lamp, and the cultures.

              One of the many improbably convenient features of C. elegans as a research subject is that their favorite growth temperature is 68F. So I just set the house thermostat to 68F (this is super reasonable in the San Jose area in winter) and every day I’d set up the microscope and transfer a quota of nematodes on a fresh plate.

      7. MusicWithRocksIn*

        I wonder if this was just one collage student playing a prank by telling this one kid that the library took fish – or if it was a rumor that got out of hand like the ‘if your roommate commits suicide then you pass all your classes’ thing.

        1. JB*

          I’ll bet it was someone else he was trying to foist the fish off on who just told him that to get him to leave them alone.

            1. Mad Harry Crewe*

              We did get to do that in high school once. The band teacher’s wife was pregnant and they had to deal with some kind of emergency. We were all loitering outside the band room wondering what to do until the school’s security guy rolled up on his bike and was like “What are you doing, get outta here before they find a substitute” and we all bailed. It was an open campus and you could have a free period in your schedule, so having students wandering around during class time was unremarkable.

          3. Overgraduate*

            There were some good ones at a university in my city, that’s about 500 years old.

            Supposedly a student once demanded a glass of port in the middle of an exam, as was his right under the university code.
            Then when he left the exam he was fined for not wearing a sword.

      8. Language Lover*

        When I’ve worked the front desk at a library, it’s amazing what people tell us they heard the library does or offers. This is probably the most unusual. At the same time, I’m not the least bit surprised.

      10. (Witty Name)*

        Ooh! Beta fish story here, too. I was in fundraising for a human services nonprofit. We had an annual gala, chaired by a rotating series of volunteers that were always very well off women of a certain type. One year, the chosen theme was something tropical. The chosen centerpieces included vases filled w sliced tropical fruits- not sure how to describe them but they were pretty. However!! When you’re raising funds to support food insecure people… not a good look. Not horrific in and of itself but not a great visual. BUT! The same women who chose those centerpieces also thought it would be awesome to add ambiance by having bowls with beta fish on the bars and in other areas. One bartender hid the bowls part way through the night because more than one drunk attendee tried to eat one. And then came the end of the night- when the event committee had no idea what to do with these living creatures they were using as decor. Yup. We’re breaking down the room and there are the fish. With nowhere to go. Staff ended up adopting them. My 3 year old son loved Spider-Man, who lived happily in his room for several years… but WTF. This event led to an official policy of 1) not wasting usable food as decor and 2) never, ever using living creatures as decor. Can’t believe it had to be made official.. yet… I can.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          I was picturing a fruit bouquet, which is silly but edible. *Throwing away the tropical fruit centerpiece* would not have occurred to me.

          1. (Witty Name)*

            The fruit was sliced and arranged inside vases. (To be fair it was pretty to look at). But the fruit was then unusable…

            1. Jennifer Juniper*

              I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of the guests simply upended a vase or reached in it to get the fruit.

        2. MusicWithRocksIn*

          Can confirm that drunk people will dare each other to swallow a live fish. One of my mom’s friends threw a Luau once (they all worked radio, not a normal mom friend type of party) where they used fish as centerpieces, and a ton of them were swallowed whole that night.

      11. just passing through*

        I am a fish person (it’s the only pet my lease allows!), and I would absolutely have just accepted the free new fish and taken it home. Although it’s just occurred to me that he may have wanted it back…?

      12. Candace*

        Wow. Sounds like my library – we had a fish left behind on a desk, with a note that said “Please take care of this fish. His name is Andre. He is a nice fish.” We did, actually, and Andre lived happily in the Library for a few years till he died of fishy old age.

      13. MM*

        Ha. My aunt was a university professor for decades. One year she accepted a student’s fish to watch over break, and the fish did unfortunately die. For her retirement party at LEAST 30 years later, my cousin collected testimonials from former students, and this student–who had in the meantime gone on to be a very successful published author–accused her of killing his fish in his letter. (It was a joke, which was entirely in keeping with his whole authorial style and brand. No one took it amiss at all.)

      1. Siege (The other one)*

        Ha! Okay, I’m not losing my mind. I saw your posts and had a brief crisis of “wait did I sleep post that or something?”

    6. Just stoppin' by to chat*

      My favorite part of this is the last sentence “we’re not a fish-related business” :)

    7. machinedreams*

      This is me joining Team Fish Story. By proxy, because it’s actually a friend’s story.

      She worked the customer service desk at Walmart for a while. One day, she had a customer come in and throw a goldfish at her. This was not a Walmart that sold goldfish. (Back when they actually did.)

        2. machinedreams*

          Near as I can remember — because it’s been fifteen years now, at least — she was the lucky employee that had the misfortune of helping this guy when something was wrong. He had a return, she wouldn’t let him do it because it was outside the return policy and it wasn’t a return because it was damaged or anything like that, and he was being a jerk and a half so she REALLY wasn’t inclined to see if there was anything she could do.

          His response was not to ask for a manager, no. That would’ve been normal and she would’ve been like “Okay, lemme get them for you.” No, THAT’S where the goldfish-flinging came in.

          1. Siege (The other one)*

            Wha???? Did he have it just, like, on his person? Just come from the country fair???

  4. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

    Cover for a philandering boss. Did so as best as I could. Given the unusual circumstances, I couldn’t do so fully.

    Pirate professional software. NO ****** WAY.

    Write a phony performance report, that was designed to get someone fired. NO ****** WAY.

      1. La Triviata*

        I once got involved in a weeks-long struggle with someone who insisted that I had to share some expensive software with her so the organization wouldn’t have to pay for her to get her own copy. She won. sigh ….

        1. Worldwalker*

          That is a hill I would die on.

          I’m a small software company. How can I expect anyone to respect my IP if I don’t respect others?

      2. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

        When I went to work for a software vendor, we got very uptight about people doing that. Obviously.

      3. Sharpie*

        I kinda misread it as ‘professional pirate software’ and wondered what on earth program Jack Sparrow needs.

        2. Working Hypothesis*

          There are plenty of professional maritime management suites for ships’ captains. You just need to modify it slightly to add features that track incoming plunder, crew wounds, etc. And distribution of loot instead of payroll ought to be a slightly tweaked feature because the amounts are handled differently; it’s on a percentage of profit system.

          1. Kuddel Daddeldu*

            Percentage of profits is quite common in fishing, so there’s surely software for that…

      4. many bells down*

        I’ve been asked to pirate video for events (not by my boss, but by members who want to hold said events). I work for a CHURCH.

        1. Liane*

          Doesn’t surprise me. Years ago a friend who was a member of the LDS church played an animated story from the Book of Mormon for my kids, with my okay. Friend pointed out the unique anti-piracy PSA: after the standard “copying is a crime…FBI…Interpol” warning was “set a good example for your children, be honest like [Book of Mormon Figure].”

      5. AnonInCanada*

        Why is the “Don’t Copy That Floppy” jingle from the early 90’s now stuck in my head? Thank you, philandering boss!

      1. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

        Generally, different places – but pirating, was asked to do that at a couple of places.

        Phony performance reports – one was at one place, to get someone fired, I refused to do it because it was wrong and it was due to malfunctioning equipment, not the person’s hands on that machine’s keyboard.

        The other was to do an assessment on a project, and I was ordered to “write it this way”. I resigned. They then called me back and worked a compromise – I would be allowed to do the study “straight” – I would leave the report on the director’s desk and she could accept it or just shred it. But don’t ask me to lie.

        1. Napkin Thief*

          For some reason, I originally interpreted 2 & 3 as being part of the unusual circumstances that led to 1 being less than fully successful. I don’t know if it’s better or worse for you that the terrible was spread across different places, but it made for some entertaining headcanon!

      1. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

        The first time – way back in the 70s – no, it wasn’t my management that asked me to do that. It was someone in a remote office – long story but I was completely in control of the situation and my own managers said I did the right thing, The second – it was in a politically charged place and the director had decided that a project from another division would not go through. So I was asked to write a report “this way” and put my name on it.

        I refused. My immediate manager said “you can get yourself into trouble” and I said “no, I quit. You have my home phone number if you want to discuss this. I’ll be at the house.”

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          Oh yes, I saw your comment above about it. Did you agree to the compromise? Good for you for quitting over that!!

          1. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

            Yes. And ironically, the study I did – HONESTLY – said what the boss wanted it to say. Our systems couldn’t handle the software needed to support the project.

    4. Rich H*

      I got asked to pirate software for someone at work once.

      I had to point out that I’m a developer … someone who writes software to earn a living.

      I’m still not sure if they understood why asking me was a bad idea.

    5. Sparkles McFadden*

      Pirate professional software…ugh.

      I was asked to load company software on company hardware and sneak the computer out of the building to give to an employee who has been fired. She was a friend of my boss and the boss “didn’t want her to go away empty handed.” I said no and explained why. My boss said she was calling HR because she was going to fire me for insubordination. I told her “OK. That should be an interesting meeting.” I was kind of disappointed that she gave up at that point.

      1. tangerineRose*

        This was so wrong! And why didn’t the boss do it herself? Was she setting you up or afraid she might get caught?

        1. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

          In the corporate world, people in high places often order nefarious activities in the enterprise.

          But they’re often careful enough to shield themselves from consequences. When the s**t hits the fan, it’s everyone for him (or her)-self. If and when that occurs, those who were directed to perform dirty deeds will often be forced to take the blame, and the ones who directed the action will likely “skate”.

        1. pancakes*

          Also a lawyer, not IP though I did work on a freelance project at an IP firm for a little over a year, also kind of horrified. I think this is a red flag. PootyBootToots, I have a feeling that if you’re reasonably good at what you do, you could be making more for it at a firm that isn’t staggeringly cheap!

  5. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    Be the girlfriend of the manager’s son, because he was 26 and had never had a girlfriend and was shy/socially awkward and needed a relationship to get him out of severe depression.

    No. I didn’t do it.

      1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

        This was decades ago, I think maybe around 2002, I’m pretty sure I just murmured something about being more into women (I’m pansexual). Did leave that firm eventually.

        1. Storm in a teacup*

          Decades ago = 2002 (*o*)
          I feel old
          And now sad
          And binge eating the popcorn I’d grabbed for this thread

        2. Required (Name)*

          DECADES ago? That was 19 years! WWII was decades ago. The civil war was decades ago. 2002 was a blip ago.

          1. Yep I'm Old*

            Well, in one year, it would be considered more than one decade. I’ll go eat my feelings now that I feel super old.

    8. I should really pick a name*

      Based on the posts I’ve seen you make, if you wrote a book about your life, I’d buy it.

      1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

        From 2000-2020 it would…be rather depressing to be honest. And there’s a lot of times where I was the one in the wrong.

        2. Zelda*

          Carrie Fisher got some entertaining writing out of several of the effin’ train wrecks that happened in her life. And we’ve seen evidence that you are quite the good writer. Just sayin’.

    9. EPLawyer*

      Prettttty suuuuuure that is illegal.
      And kinda sad. I feel for the kid. If he found out his parent did this, it probably did not help his depression.

      1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

        My 20s and early 30s were….eventful. Actually was thankful when I hit 40 and things seemed to calm down a bit. Late 40s means I’m generally settled and less likely to take any crud.

        1. Miss Muffet*

          the best part of getting older, imo! My give-shitability is getting lower by the year and it’s wonderful.

          1. Slow Gin Lizz*

            Same. My current LL is giving me crap about moving out b/c apparently it says in my lease that I am not allowed to move out between Sept-Apr. Well, not apparently, it does say that in my lease. And I’m like, well, I’m moving out in Dec, whaddya gonna do, evict me? (I mean, yes, he could come after me for the $$ but I live in a state where tenants’ rights are much stronger, thank goodness. Limiting the times someone can move when they’re in a month-to-month rent is truly a dick move.)

            Were this 15 years ago I would be super scared of him coming after me but now I’m like, go ahead, jerkface. See how judges like your weird tenancy rules.

            1. Working Hypothesis*

              Especially limiting the times when somebody can move out **to less than half of the year**. It would be one thing if it was like “No moving out in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, because we don’t have the staff on hand to process relevant paperwork that week.” But that’s ridiculous.

              1. Slow Gin Lizz*

                Thank you. That is what everyone I talk to is saying (except the lawyers, who of course refuse to comment on that part of it). The idea I guess is that it’s hard to find renters in the winter, but, um, I moved in in Dec so….

                And we live in a very high demand area. Finding tenants is not a problem unless the place is a total dump, which it isn’t.

            2. Liz*

              I had a similar situation with my last landlord. Let’s just say he was cheap, and well, kind of sexist. Generally a nice guy, but a bit old-fashioned in some of his thinking. So I wanted to move out mid-month. OH NO. that was completely unacceptable. Fine. I’ll pay rent on both for a week or so and move gradually, have time to come back and clean, etc. I also must have told him a hundred times I was moving out on x date, and would be COMPLETELY out and handing in my keys on y date, which gave me a little less than a week for HIM to go in and paint, etc.

              So I have movers coming, and he supposedly had a new tenant. He calls me the night before my movers were coming, to tell me, not ask, if he could bring someone to see the apt, as his other tenant fell through. I said sure, but made sure to mention the movers would be there. He seemed a bit put out, like I was inconveniencing HIM. I just let it go, but today I would have said “its fine as long as you stay out of the way of the movers I hired and PAID for” because he liked to be there to make sure nothing of HIS was damaged.

              This was on a Saturday. Sunday I came back to get some more stuff, and then Monday at lunch. Remember how I said I told him a hundred times the timeline? Well, HE was in there, hard at work painting. And had moved a lot of my stuff, INCLUDING my grandmother’s china, to the middle of the floor. I was pissed. His response was “he thought I was leaving it” in what universe? So I got petty, and took everything, including my stepladder HE was using, and all the paper towels and tp. I came back the following weekend to clean, and he had already painted the baseboards, where I had intended to vacuum up dust that was under furniture. I said eff that, and just left it. This was almost 20 years ago and it STILL makes me mad!

    12. awesome3*

      One of those things that could make a charming romance novel but is absolutely horrifying in real life.

        1. Metadata minion*

          I could see it being a cute story if the son is also not into it and they play along to make dad/boss happy while going on Hilarious Capers of some sort. But they cannot under any circumstances actually hook up.

          1. Your local password resetter*

            We can always introduce a Best Friend on both sides that the other can pair up with. And to tangle the web further for extra complicated Shenanigans.

        2. AcademiaNut*

          That describes quite a lot of romantic comedies, honestly. The ones where I want to scream “run away” to one of the leads, or I’m happy they end up together so no-one else has to put up with their creepy dysfunction.

    13. Meep*

      OMG. The owner was allegedly trying to set up his son with my Toxic Coworker’s daughter. I don’t know how much of that is actually true, because she is a pathological liar and I have heard many a story about how “desirable” she is to men who are clearly being polite.

      The kid was not a bad kid. Just awkward as heck. I drove him home a couple of times while he was interning for us because he didn’t drive. I once asked him what his favorite music genre was and he replied “I don’t know.” Not in an “I like all music” sort of way but in a “I am afraid to share my opinion” sort of way. o.o

      1. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

        I did meet the guy once, he was definitely very very nervous about speaking to women but at the same time a ‘well actually’ type. Definitely didn’t find him physically attractive either. (He showed up to work once, this was before my boss made the…ahem..request).

        Basically the complete opposite to the man I have been married to now for over 16 years.

        1. Elizabeth West*

          I went out with a boss’s son once when I was in college. It was actually nice; we had a great time. He didn’t live in the same place, so I never saw him again because the boss moved away shortly after that, but if they’d stayed and he’d lived closer and was into it, I probably would have kept seeing him.

          I would NEVER EVER do that now, though.

      2. Tiny Soprano*

        My very first job the boss kept trying to get me to hang out with her son… who I already knew from uni and wouldn’t have gone near with a barge-pole. Now, to be fair that’s a bit more on par for small family-owned businesses, and there weren’t many people in my uni course so I could truthfully say we already ran in the same circles and went to a lot of the same parties. Fortunately that worked. Apparently he’s now entered the manosphere big time so bullet well and truly dodged.

    14. Mary Kay*

      I’m a woman and my female manager asked me in the dead of winter during sub zero temperatures if she could wear my winter hat home. I take public transportation and would be in the cold for a total of about 40 minutes off and on. She wanted to wear my hat because she was going to get a haircut after work and for some reason was getting her hair dried afterwards.

        2. JJ Bittenbinder*

          Yeah, many places charge extra to dry hair. So, she was being cheap AND rude AND abusing her position, most likely.

    16. On the road again …*

      Single mom here – I wasn’t even given gf status! I was told to have s3x with the owners younger brother (also an employee) bc he wasn’t getting enough. Apparently my shocked expression made him think I was on board bc he provided details: at a local hotel, on my lunch hour (and don’t take more than an hour or eat at my desk!) and pay for the room bc poor kid is on 80% commission and has a house to pay for.
      Yeah, no, only job I ever rage quit. On the positive side I had a better offer (in all respects lol) that same day.

      1. Working Hypothesis*

        Holy crap. I really hope you — or at least someone, since I don’t think for a second you were the only employee an ass like that was mistreating — sued them for sexual harassment. Doesn’t matter if it’s on somebody else’s behalf; ordering you to do sex work when that isn’t the job you were actually hired for counts, big time.

      3. Caliente*

        Get
        OUT! What?! I feel like you should be able to report someone to the police for this- solicitation? Felony insults?
        I would’ve been like Yeah I’m not a sex worker, but you can probably find someone on Craig’s List…?
        And also don’t take more than an hour or eat at your desk?! I am flabber-fucking-gasted right now.

      4. RB Purchase*

        I have a lot to say about a lot of this but it is WILD that in this scenario you weren’t allowed to eat and THEN HAD TO PAY FOR THE ROOM

      5. Your local password resetter*

        Did you smell sulphur in his office? Did he have a strange penchant for spear-fishing and never taking off his hat?

      6. Cera*

        I had the floor supervisor at a factory (not my supervisor) ask me to have s3x with him in the bathroom and when I starred at him in shock he offered to pay me. Later I realized that another (married) office worker did it in order to use his truck. ….. and that’s why she was so upset when I wouldn’t let her use mine.

      7. Despachito*

        What the actual….. what.

        And that is when I thought Keymaster is the winner because there is no way below this line.

        Apparently… there was. I am left speechless.

    18. Thomas*

      I’m a PhD student and my advisor wanted me to pick up working on a piece of code left behind by a prior post-doc.

      The code was totally undocumented, with anemic comments and no version control. It was in C++, which I didn’t know yet and which my boss expected me to learn fully in 2~3 days. The code was about high level quantum semiconductor physics and the professor who’d been supposed to give me and a coworker a course on the subject had refused, so we’d been teaching ourselves from the textbook. I’d been supposed to have a supervisor (my advisor didn’t know how to code so he couldn’t supervise me) but he was too busy for me, so I just didn’t have a supervisor.

      And then to top it all off my advisor forbade me from taking the time to read the code and told me to just “use it like a black box”.

      The code, predictably, turned out to have a very subtle bug which ruined all my attempts at simulations with it. It took months of being yelled at and derided for failing to convince my advisor of this. After which he still said it was my fault. Somehow.

      Oh and this was during the summer, so I was being paid 20hrs/wk with no academic credit. My advisor expected 60-80 hour work weeks out of me.

      3. Beany*

        The setup sounds very familiar to me. I work in computational physics, and code bases with good documentation and proper version control are the exception rather than the norm. Even when starting from a mature code, students & postdocs have to extend and twist them for new situations, and there’s usually no time for documenting these local changes if you’re actually trying to get results in a short timescale.

        I wasn’t expecting the yelling & derision you describe, though. Given how normal this is, senior people I’ve worked with are used to subtle bugs and weeks-long rabbit holes of wasted effort. Your advisor was comically out of touch & you have my sympathy.

        1. MassChick*

          I suspect the yelling and derision was because the advisor didn’t know how to code. And assumed it was easy/trivial

      4. Rachel*

        I have also lived nearly this same situation in my PhD (inherited a project and could never replicate the data, boss tried to kick me out of the program because I clearly was incompetent or lazy, I am not at all a programmer and it took years to figure out that their code was completely wrong).

        You have my sympathies and I hope you graduate and get out soon!

    20. Tyche*

      I wasn’t outright asked/told to date my boss’s son, but it was heavily implied that I should and that my career would’ve gone better if I did. Instead I fell in love with and married someone else, he lost his shit and became an incel and tried to get me fired repeatedly. I didn’t get fired but I didn’t get any promotions. Thankfully not working at that circus anymore.

    21. RB Purchase*

      Something kind of similar happened to me, but thankfully much lower stakes! A supervisor of mine in a big box store wanted me to sleep with a coworker in a different department who I’d been flirty with because he hadn’t had a girlfriend in a few years. She pressured me for a couple of months about it but in my last month, she probably mentioned it every shared shift and he also got progressively flirtier the closer it was to my last day. He asked me on a date during my last week there and I agreed because he was nice and fun but he was kind of a dork and I was moving 1,000 miles away, so I didn’t take it seriously.

      In retrospect, I think she may have told him that I was 100% down to clown – I was NOT. We had one kiss in my car and then he pointed to the backseat and asked me if I was nervous and if it was my first time. We did nothing more after that than the kiss. I was SO glad I was moving across the country a few days later and never had to see him ever again.

      1. RB Purchase*

        Point of clarification – I wasn’t flirty because the dude hadn’t had a girlfriend in a few years, I was flirty because I was a flirt.

    22. Worldwalker*

      Have you submitted that manager for the bad boss competition? Looks like a pretty strong contender.

    25. Zippy*

      I was asked to do this in high school for a developmentally disabled student. By a teacher. I declined.

  6. OrigCassandra*

    This is fairly pedestrian and not funny, but… in my first Real Job(TM), after I wrote a public FAQ list in my off-hours (but about the work I did) that became very popular in the industry, the Big Boss where I worked was at pains to tell me that further such writing was absolutely an acceptable use of my work time.

    He did not, of course, tell me the copyright ramifications of doing the writing on work time — in the US where I am, that lets the company call it “work for hire” and own its copyright.

    I did, because I didn’t know any better then, but when the company got bought out a couple of years after I left, I quietly republished under my own name and the new company didn’t give me any static about it.

    1. Boof*

      hmm. If you write it on your own time, but working at the company really helped you write it (because it was about work you did), not sure you are fully in the clear with owning the copyright either. I think boss was just being nice, not sneaky. But maybe copyright lawyers can weigh in. (And i’m sure it will vary by location)

      1. MistOrMister*

        It sounds like the boss WAS being sneaky. The way I read this, OP did further writing during work hours and then was not able to claim that work because now it was considered to belong to the employer since it was done at work.

          1. Amaranth*

            I read it that OrigCassandra wrote it up in off hours, then the boss loved it and said to go ahead and use work time to continue working on it, so that flipped it to work for hire. I’m not sure Boss was being sneaky so much as clueless – if the company actually filed for copyright then I doubt OC would have been able to repub later. However, I believe Boof is incorrect that using work knowledge to write it would make it work for hire regardless of using work hours — that seems like it would prohibit people from writing about any area of expertise gained through work experience or schooling.

      2. OrigCassandra*

        Big Boss was definitely not being nice. I didn’t put this together at the time, but Big Boss had a history of having employees ghostwrite articles and presentations for him at work, stuff he then put his own name on. Of course he wanted me doing that too.

        When the company got bought and most of its employees laid off, Big Boss’s written and presented output declined to near-zero, and what he did put out there was rehashed. Funny thing about that.

        Here’s what US law says a work for hire is:

        (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. (17 U.S.C. § 101)

        In my situation, there was no written agreement/instrument (so exit clause 2 stage right), and I had not been tasked with writing anything other than project documentation (which absolutely fits clause 1, no question about it) until Big Boss grinned toothily and said “sure, write professional stuff on company time.”

        1. Boof*

          thanks, the boss’s habit of taking credit for other’s work makes it a lot clearer (to me at least!)

          1. Em*

            Had a similar issue with a jerk boss taking credit for my writing, not in a copyright sense but to our big boss. I was young and in my first year of my professional career and was tasked with writing this massive, very very important report. I couldn’t understand why my jerk boss kept coming back to me with requests for context, background research, and structural edits that sounded like he didn’t even know what he was asking for. I was massively worried that I wasn’t a good enough writer to survive in the field and that I was going to be fired for not meeting my jerk boss’ expectations.

            Turns out, jerk boss was taking my writing and presenting it to big boss as if he had done the research and writing. Which, seeing as how the report was actually HIS job, made sense (he was too busy surfing Amazon during business hours to do any work). When the big boss came back with questions/requests, my jerk boss couldn’t answer them and tried to get what the big boss wanted from me without letting on.

            A question came up about a (correct) decision I had made. Jerk boss was so bad at his job, he thought the decision was wrong and threw me under the bus to big boss who asked me via email to explain what happened. After big boss read my two paragraph email, he apparently recognized my writing style as being the same as the massive report and clued me in.

            Big boss was too classy to tell me directly that he was baffled by jerk boss’ sudden jump in apparent writing skills for this report. He was, however, just classy enough to forward the email chain he’d been having with jerk boss to me to ask me his next question WITH JERK BOSS COPIED. It was a glorious moment and I still have that email saved.

            Jerk boss did not learn from this and made me write my own (FIRST!) employee evaluation – a big no no in our office. Big boss again, instantly recognized that jerk boss hadn’t written it and tore jerk boss a new one.

            Jerk boss is no longer with us and big boss has gotten many well deserved promotions. Huzzah for justice :)

            (I also once had to physically step between jerk boss and a lower-level employee as he was so angry, it looked like he was going to hit the employee. . .)

        2. Worldwalker*

          Given that you wrote the initial part on your own time, the company at best would have owned a derivative work. That can be a real hairball.

      3. Hex Libris*

        Cassandra would likely be in the clear regardless, or tell-all books about working various places, or memoirs that heavily feature work life, or industry-insight books couldn’t exist.

      5. Worldwalker*

        Um … no. No how, no way, not even slightly.

        Copyright covers ownership of the words you write, not the knowledge or experience that enabled you to write them.

    2. Coenobita*

      I clearly scrolled down here too fast after the fish stories, because I definitely read that as “pescatarian” and not “pedestrian”!

  7. middle name danger*

    Not something wildly unrelated to my job, but once I asked for help managing an unreasonable caseload, and then less than a week later when a coworker left, I was handed half of their work on top of my own. Cried in the bathroom then went back to my desk and immediately opened Indeed.

    1. ferrina*

      Oof, yeah. I was once told to run a 4-5 person department by myself. I only had 1 year professional experience, so I while I knew this was a big issue, I was desperate enough for a job that I did it. Even though I definitely made some mistakes, I actually did decently and kept it running, even adding a couple new initiatives. It was almost 4 years until it was properly staffed, at which point the new boss immediately laid me off.

      1. Richard Hershberger*

        Working your way out of a job: I did that once, in my twenties. I was brought in as a temp for a firm that had completely dropped the ball on payroll. This was that transitional era when payroll was computerized, but the hours were on paper. Whoever was supposed to be doing the data entry hadn’t been, and they were ridiculously behind. So I came in and entered the data at a furious pace. Once I was caught up, they booted me out the door. I later heard that the owner’s daughter was given the job.

        1. Queen Anon*

          Worked myself out of temp jobs that way at least twice that I remember. They just needed someone long enough to catch up but vastly overestimated the length of time catching up would need. (Or maybe all the employees at both those companies just worked verrrry slowly – who knows!)

          1. Lenora Rose*

            I’ve done that a few times with temp jobs or substitute jobs. But always to the pleasant surprise of the company and good reviews for the next position up, when I did.

            (I’ve also been asked to keep up unreasonably fast paces or commit to nigh impossible tasks at temp jobs so… My conclusion is less that temps or ex-workers were necessarily lazy and more that managers don’t always know what a manageable pace is for the work itself.)

          2. Lady grey*

            Ha, I did that too! I had a temp job at a company that sold medical supplies. It was arranged I would stay there for at least three months. So to start I got several days of training to use their software, and it seemed I would work there for a while.
            The company had just taken over another company that sold incontinence materials. They had sent a paper questionnaire to the customers of this company, to see what kind of product these people used, so they could recommend something from their own stock for them. It was my job to sort through boxes and boxes of questionnaires, scan them and put the scans in the digital files of these customers.
            But, people who are satisfied with a certain pad or diaper often want that specific brand and type, because it works for them. So lots of customers just added the wrapping of their product to the envelope.
            So I went through all the boxes and had to trow away all these packages. I was not supposed to do anything with the wrappings, but throw them away. Bad luck for the elderly customers.
            So I worked as hard and fast as I could, and kept washing my hands a lot, because these wrappings just seemed to smell a bit off. Yuck.
            And then I was finished in two weeks, and was let go.

    2. CaviaPorcellus*

      I relate to this, and I’m sorry it’s so common. I was a caseworker for public welfare programs at the beginning of the pandemic. At one point, every other person in my unit was on 2 week EPSL, leaving me alone to work the ENTIRE unit’s caseload. I was going through 15-16 interviews a day and processing Medicaid applications in between. It was nuts.

      And, yeah, I have a new job now.

    3. Meep*

      Oof. I wish I was as strong as you. We fired a guy my boss didn’t really want to fire (but should have been fired) because my Toxic Coworker didn’t like him (chronic illness, wealthy parents who bought him a house, a wife, not “hot”) and convinced him if he wanted to keep me they would have to fire him (I just wanted them to coach him, man). Because of it, one of the founders left after realizing he was being mistreated. Didn’t matter he was working part-time and the guy fired hadn’t done any work in a month (only uncovered after he left), I was supposed to be doing all their workload because they left because of “me”.

      The only reason I was involved in the first place was that these grown adults 2.5x my age (straight of college) refused to communicate their expectations with me and left me to do it. He was a sexist (I am female), ageist (I was a year younger), elitist (he had a Master’s. I didn’t) prick so it didn’t go over well but they also made it very clear I had no authority over him so why he would listen to me I never know.

      The only benefit I gleaned from it was I could pick up instantly when my Toxic Coworker tried to pit me against the next guy she didn’t like because he wasn’t hot enough.

    4. Loredena Frisealach*

      I am in IT ,and at one point my role was mostly dev but also 2nd level phone support. Only, they were slowly closing the other longer-staffed office and shifting that work to me. Towards the end I was 24×365 support (on a pager!) and caught flak if I was *on vacation* and unreachable. The same manager had a fit if I opted to WFH rather than drive in a snow storm

    5. Ashley*

      Oh, I get that. At Former Employer, the Powers That Be decided to restructure. I had just finished a pretty successful first year as a manager, so they decided to “temporarily” double my staff and triple my client load, because the additional clients were all “small.” I ended up in tears in the VP’s office but somehow managed to make my mega-team reasonably functional, at great cost to my personal health and well-being. As soon as I got that team to the point of functionality, I was informed that I wasn’t putting enough time into my biggest client and that they would be taken away from me. It wasn’t technically a demotion, but I was told I should consider it one. (My senior manager was treated similarly.) The PTB then added the biggest problem client in the department to mine, took away my experienced supervisors, and gave me two brand new supervisors that spent the next 3-4 months in training. I was finally in a financial position to leave when they informed me that they were going to restructure my clients and teams for the 3rd time in two years. I really don’t know if someone there was overly impressed with my abilities or if I had really pissed someone off, but even the Employee Relations rep was shocked at all the turmoil during my exit interview.

    6. Clewgarnet*

      Oh, yeah. I went from second/third line tech support to being one of two people running a country-wide telecoms network. I’d often be in the office for three days at a stretch. I kept a sleeping bag under my desk to snatch an hour of sleep in between crises.

      We finally got a new head of department who actually hired some more engineers – and then promptly fired me for my ‘attitude’. (I was constantly exhausted and my brain-to-mouth filter was shot.) The new engineers talked a good game but didn’t know anything. The company folded six months after I was fired.

  8. pickaduck*

    Not me, but a co-worker, was summoned to our then-CEO’s house in the middle of a work day to dig a grave for his dog.

      1. AnonInCanada*

        I read this as “woof” at first, as in the dog’s barking saying “I’M ALIVE! Don’t bury me!”

        But yeah, WTF is right!

      1. Clorinda*

        I’m guessing big. Really big. A long tall dog, Great Dane or such. Something that needs a grace that would fit a human being, you know.

      2. The Dogman*

        Probably wouldn’t need help for a little dog…

        When my last Bullmastiff died it took three of use to lift her into the car for a trip to the crematoria. She was only 60Kg but they are not holding themselves up for you once they are gone.

        1. Meep*

          It really depends on what kind of person the boss is. I had a former boss who infantilized herself so much that some of the things she expected me to do were ridiculously out of line.

          1. The Dogman*

            This is also true… I loathe those people!

            Asking for help is one thing, demanding servitude is quite another!

        2. Rose*

          I find it interesting youre assuming the manager is some kind of reasonable logical person who would only ask for help if necessary. You are FAR more generous than me.

          1. The Dogman*

            Lol, not usually that generous, but I suppose most of the people I deal with are decent humans who want the best for their dogs…

            I have nearly forgotten much of the managerial nonsense I too suffered under in the corporate world.

            Thankfully!

        1. Jean (just Jean)*

          Oops that was supposed to be below Guin’s comment. Not trying to steal credit intended for pugsnbourbon!

    8. The Prettiest Curse*

      Okay, that makes the person who wanted their colleagues to donate so they could give their dog a Viking funeral look positively reasonable. At least they weren’t expecting anyone to build a pyre (at least, from what I remember of that post.)

    11. EvilQueenRegina*

      One job I had involved coordinating a handyperson scheme. This one time, a woman booked someone to fit a cat flap. So far, so good, until after that job was done she then came out with a request for a coffin for a DEAD cat. The coffin was not built, but a while afterwards the same woman rang up asking for something else altogether to be done, but the guys were suspicious of the request and rang her back – she confessed she really wanted the cat coffin again. She was told that we were not cat undertakers.

      1. Artemesia*

        For our last cat, I used the hot bag pizzas come in as her coffin. The pizza guy left it and although I called and told them I had and to get it they never did and so when the time came, it was a nice container for dear departed cat.

  9. Emi*

    When I was relatively new/junior, the facility director asked if my team could magically see our way to changing our independent analysis just because it looked bad for them. I looked at the team lead in a panic but she had gotten pulled into a side conversation right before that, so I just looked back at the director and said “NO.”

    2. A Poster Has No Name*

      Man, I get this literally all the time. Not quite so blunt, but we do an analysis on the performance of a product and then product team comes back asking for narrower and narrower slices in an effort to find a story that works for them.

      Sorry folks, the data is the data.

    3. RebelwithMouseyHair*

      I was asked to change the tone of a translation once. It was a set of accounts for a lawsuit, apparently the gardener at a chateau in the south of France had started getting uppity after finding out that he was being paid less than minimum wage. The accounts were about his alleged behaviour, hanging out with the castle owner’s wife, doing yoga with her by the pool, behaving more like a house guest than an employee and we were asked to make it all sound worse in the translation than in the source text. Sorry no.

      And the woman who turned up with a torn piece of paper who claimed that the scribbled Arabic text on it was a letter from her lawyer stating how much she was entitled to according to her father’s will, oh and could we just add a zero to the amount in the translation because the lawyer got it wrong? Hell no!

  10. Alex*

    My boss (at the time) asked me to be in charge of his young children (preschool aged) at our family-friendly office holiday party, so that he could drink and have a good time. His wife was unable to attend, so what was he SUPPOSED to do???

    (I said no.)

    1. Frideag Dachaigh*

      Sort of related but as a teenager I was working at a respite program for adults with disabilities. One time the director decided to drop off his four elementary school aged kids with us, a group of under staffed, mostly teenage volunteers, to go spend the evening with his wife (not the biological mother of the kids) and their baby, and have us to babysit them. He didn’t tell anyone he was doing this, few of us had met him (he had just started a few weeks earlier), and no one had met his kids. He didn’t last much longer.

      2. Artemesia*

        if he has contacted you first and also offered extra pay, you might have gone for it — but he just shows up and dumps the kids?

        1. JSPA*

          1. Seems unlikely that a place licensed for adult respite care would have the insurance, the screening or the set-up to handle babysitting kids.

          2. Just, no.

    2. SeluciaMD*

      I have a similar-ish story! When I was a teenager, my first “real” job was working at a chain restaurant as a hostess. Our GM and Floor Manager were married to eachother and had five kids. They would regularly ask me to babysit their kids – at their house, an hour away – instead of working my shift. But it was the restaurant that paid me for the time, not them. I was 16 and although it felt weird, both managers assured me it was fine and I liked babysitting and didn’t know any better so I just went with it.

      That was just the tip of the iceberg for these people – they were shady AF. So much so that they ended up getting fired for embezzling from the restaurant and an unrelated theft. Because of the way I got weirdly looped in to that drama (they were trying to pin the theft part on me – long story), once the truth came out, the regional manager was so aghast at how I’d been treated that he got me some nice severance pay (even though I’d quit several weeks before) and offered to hire me back with a huge raise and the ability to work at any other location I wanted. I took the money and declined the job offer. I was definitely too trusting and naive at that point in my life, but I wasn’t THAT naive LOL.

      2. JSPA*

        Them having the restaurant pay your babysitting hours was already embezzling, on their part! What ELSE were they stealing / misappropriating (besides your time / the cost of your time)?

    3. pancakes*

      The summer between high school and college I had a job canvassing door-to-door for an environmental group, and one woman whose door I knocked on insisted I watch her daughter for a bit while she ran an important errand. I’m an only child and had never babysat before in my life and was really uncomfortable with the idea of being responsible for her kid, but her babysitter canceled at the last minute and mom was clearly desperate. I suppose she thought I looked trustworthy? Or didn’t have much choice. This was pre-internet. She insisted, so I read the kid a story and mom was indeed back in 15 minutes or so. It was pretty weird! Not the weirdest thing that happened to me in that job, but your boss story reminded me of it. It was a relief when I met the kid and she was probably 6 or 7, not a tiny baby.

      1. Florp*

        Holy Hell. I once ran an errand and came back to find my 12YO had opened the front door to a window salesman and was busy telling him they were home alone. 12YO had been explicitly told to never answer the door when they were home alone many, many times. 12YO had to accompany me on many boring errands after that until I trusted them to be alone again. It would never have occurred to me to ask the window salesman to babysit…

        1. pancakes*

          Oh nooooo! I did something a little similar once but I was older. Old enough to know better. A reporter from the local paper knocked on our door to ask about rumors that my stepdad was about to retire. Being a somewhat boy-crazy 15-yr-old and an expert in winding up my parents, I told him they weren’t home but he could come in and have a drink in the meantime. I poured him a glass of whiskey, which we kept only for company, and felt very sophisticated. I thought he was cute! My parents of course promptly threw him out when they got home, and gave him a talking to about taking advantage of the hospitality of teens.

          1. Marillenbaum*

            I can completely understand the teenager impulse, but I am aghast that this grown adult was completely fine being offered (and accepting!) alcohol from a minor who is home alone. I hope his boss chewed him out after.

            1. pancakes*

              I hope so too. It was incredibly terrible judgment on his part! I have no idea what he expected to happen when my parents came home, either. They were livid with him. I think my stepfather said something like, “she’s 15, what’s your excuse?!”

        2. Era*

          I think my brother might be the opposite of your kid – one day when the two of us were home alone (I was probably 12/13ish, so he’d have been 9/10) the phone rang. I thing I was in my room reading, while he had been watching TV in the room with the phone or something, so he answered it. By the time I got there he was awkwardly insisting that our dad was home, but just not able to talk right now, Grandma.

          I grabbed the phone and explained to her that our dad was actually running errands, and had not in fact decided to stop taking his mom’s calls (to be clear: there was and is no estrangement between them), he was just own running errands. My brother protested that he thought we were supposed to tell people that we were at home by ourselves, and I explained that that rule was for random strangers or people we didn’t know well, not for our grandmother who lived 4 hours away and couldn’t even have gotten there in time to do anything nefarious before our dad got back in 20 minutes, and who, again, was our *grandmother*.

          2. Fleur-de-Lis*

            My dad’s parents argued about what to name him when he was born. My grandmother won and he got a fairly ordinary first name (think “Michael” or “John”), while his middle name was more rarely heard (think “Elwin” or “August”). My grandfather did NOT call him by his first name, insisting on using a diminutive of his middle name that I didn’t know when I was little.
            Grandpa had a habit of calling and yelling for “Gus”, and when I answered the phone, I would say, “There’s no one by that name here” and hang up. He was loud! And scary! And on the mean side! Finally my younger brother figured it out and would take the phone away from me and go look for our dad, if he was around. The other problem was that our dad worked nights and Grandpa called right in the middle of his sleeping time. All around, Grandpa was a giant asshole. He could have just said, “I meant your dad, Michael.” Ugh. But no. He did not.

      2. Elizabeth West*

        This reminds me of the first time I went to London. It was so long ago they were still using little yellow paper tickets in the tube station turnstiles. A harried man dressed in business clothes randomly asked me to accompany his child (a boy around ten or eleven years old) to meet the kid’s mother. Clearly, he had to go to work and couldn’t drop him off.

        We rode the tube to Westminster together. The kid was great—very polite, very calm, not freaked out by it at all. When we got there, I asked if he wanted me to walk him anywhere, but he said he knew exactly where to meet his mum and then vanished. Nowadays, I would insist on it, but back then, kids were more free-range and we ran all over by ourselves, so I figured he was used to this and would be fine.

        2. Virginia Plain*

          I love that you think we are super high tech these days but paper tickets still very much exist on the tube! Most regular travellers use an Oyster card (a smart card you touch on a circle to get through the barrier) or you can use a contactless bank card in the same way, but paper tickets be they single, return or lasting a week/month/year are still available! Turnstiles did go out with the ark though – vicious pairs of little automatic gates that will get you right in the backside if you aren’t nippy!

    4. Le Sigh*

      Okay not work-related, but this made me think of the weird assumptions people make. When I was in my mid-20s, my aunt freaked the hell out two nights before my cousin’s wedding because she had just assumed I would be willing to watch her kids during the rehearsal dinner. She had not asked me and if she had, I would have informed her that I had to work (because I have a job like her) and couldn’t attend, but even if I could I wasn’t going to skip it to babysit her kids.

      And ftr, they’re great kids, I love ’em … but they were 17, 16 and 11. They really did not need me.

    5. Elenna*

      But but but he has socializing to do! He can’t be expected to babysit his kids, that’s the women’s job! /s

      (You didn’t say you were female-presenting but, y’know, it seems likely.)

    6. Needs More Cookies*

      I was doing a co-op term at a sort-of dot-com office through my university, way back in the home dialup days. One of the (older, male) managers, not even my manager, pulled me aside and mentioned that some sort of Take Your Kid To Work day was coming up, and he’d like it if I could essentially supervise his 13-year-old son while he surfed the web for the day.

      I immediately panicked and he backed off. I told him was that I had zero babysitting experience, yes really, none, despite being the only female intern in the office and everything!

      But my real concern was that I’d have to spend the day being the Internet Porn Police for some kid with high-speed Internet access for the first time in his life and no incentive to respect my authority.

      1. I take tea*

        I first read this as your manager wanting to surf the web the whole day instead of supervising his kid. Which, given some of the stories here, would not have been unlikely either.

    7. Silence Will Fall*

      I worked at a movie theater in high school. I can’t tell you how many parents would bring their young children (like toddler age) to R-rated movies and when the kid would get scared, try to dump said kid on the high school aged staff so that the parents could finish the movie.

  11. AlexandrinaVictoria*

    I had to babysit a donkey in the rain until his owner came to pick him up. (Live Nativity)

    1. GoryDetails*

      I… would actually have been into babysitting the donkey, at least if I had some kind of rain-gear…

      1. Dust Bunny*

        Yeah, I’d have been down for this. I used to work for a veterinarian, though, and that skews your perspective of what is “reasonable” where animals are concerned.

        I haven’t worked for a veterinarian in years now but I’d still do it if for some reason there was a donkey at my library.

        1. Sleepless*

          Vet here, and I was thinking sort of the same. I can see it…husband calls me like “where ARE you?” and I’m like, duh, I’m waiting with the donkey until his owner picks him up. What’s wrong with that?

        2. BubbleTea*

          It sounds from earlier stories upthread that a donkey in the library is not impossible! “I heard the library took donkeys…”

    4. Mr. Shark*

      haha, yeah, I think we need more details. How did this come about? And how was the donkey, was it okay standing there in the rain with you? Was it on a leash?
      Somehow I picture you on the side of the road at a bus stop, with a leash and a rain slicker (both on you and on the donkey), just waiting for the owner.

      1. Need More Sunshine*

        Oh my goodness, imagine a donkey with a yellow rain bucket hat on with cutouts for its ears!

      2. Seeking Second Childhood*

        A bus pulls up with lots of legs. Totoro gets off. AlexandrinaVictoria and the donkey get on.

    7. pancakes*

      This reminds me of another incident at my canvassing job, when I found a goat wandering a country road and took it door to door with me until I found who it belonged to. There was some rope around its neck so clearly it had been tied up nearby. It didn’t take long for neighbors to identify a likely owner, but I thought she’d at least subscribe to our newsletter in gratitude for returning the goat, and instead she just muttered “thanks” and slammed the door in my face!

      1. Working Hypothesis*

        We live in a fairly rural area with small hobby farms all over, and once my oldest kid came home from school and phoned me from the street corner, saying “I can’t get back to the house. There’s a cow in our yard and it keeps charging me every time I try to walk across the grass!!”

        I went out and, sure enough, this cow I had never seen before was in our front yard. I took a few steps out onto the grass and she ran at me too, so I climbed onto a nearby boulder and phoned the local animal control department. Meantime, the cow kept circling the boulder, trying to find a way to get closer to me, and I kept scrambling to the other side of the rock.

        Animal control said they would send somebody, but it might take a while. They asked if I was in a safe place for now. I said, “Well, kind of, but I’m on top of a big rock wearing my nightgown, and it would really help to be able to get back into the house!” They said they’d try to hurry.

        Reader, they did not hurry. Eventually, after an hour and a half or so, the cow got bored when I didn’t come down, and wandered off around to the side yard where the grazing was better. My kid, who had been doing their homework in the road, ran for the house when I told them to, and I did likewise.

        About two hours later, the animal control people came by. They went round and found the neighbor whose cow had broken out and returned her to them, advising them to secure their pen better. Apparently they didn’t do that too well, because the cow was back about four more times over the next few months. We got to keeping a phone number listed only as “COW OWNER” on our fridge so we could call directly and ask them to come get her back. (They did tell us early on that the cow was very friendly and was probably just asking to be petted when she ran toward us. Which was definitely reassuring — but when several hundred pounds of animal runs at you, it may not always matter what their intentions are, if you’re not positive they’ll stop in time.)

        Eventually, I went over to visit the neighbor who owned the cow, to see what was going on. A very nice lady explained to me that the cow was her husband’s pet, but that he had had to take a job with long hours, so she was taking care of the cow, who was very lonely without other cows and without much attention from her master. She told me that she was trying to persuade her husband to get rid of the cow for its own sake, since it was clearly unhappy. She asked if it was okay to tell him that I had come by to talk about the cow’s frequent visits to our yard, feeling that it might help to convince him that the cow needed a new home.

        It must have worked. We never saw the cow again. I hope she ended up in a better home, wherever she went.

          1. Working Hypothesis*

            Thank you! It’s become one of the family’s favorite stories, even making it into a song my brother wrote (“Our yard has deer and rabbits and sometimes the neighbor’s cow…”). It just felt so perfectly representative of the newly rural experience for people who’d all lived in big cities for a long time before that. I won’t say that I’d never had to call animal control in New York City… but not for a cow!

        2. Bowserkitty*

          This is kind of cute but also quite wild! I love imagining a charging cow who only wants pets… (Although in your position I too would have runoft…)

    9. Zona the Great*

      Off Topic but I once lived in a small New Mexican village and I had to call in late once because the donkey wouldn’t move from the road. If you know donkeys, you know this is a real thing; donkey’s gonna donkey. My boss was like, “Oh okay! See you when you get here!”

      1. Anomalous*

        I once got caught in a rush hour traffic jam caused by a group of wild turkeys that refused to leave the road until they were good and ready.

      2. Anomalous*

        I was once caught in a rush hour traffic jam caused by some wild turkeys, who refused to leave the road until they were good and ready.

        1. Arabella Flynn*

          Ah yes. Turkey season has begun in Massachusetts. Sometimes Harvard Square just sort of… stops, because of a combination of feral turkeys and freshmen with smartphones wandering into the road.

      3. Charismatic megafauna*

        I work near a national park. It’s in our new employee guidance that calling in late because “wildlife” is blocking you is absolutely okay, even encouraged.

      4. Working Hypothesis*

        My father was once delayed three hours on the way home because a black bear had lain down in the middle of the highway and refused to budge. The whole of New Jersey rush hour traffic ground to a halt behind that bear.

      5. Princesss Sparklepony*

        I used to live on (in?) a cul de sac. The across the way neighbors had a very large Saint Bernard, sweet dog. But she would take to plopping herself down in the middle of the road and if you had a normal car for the times you would not get past her. So you had to wait until Pooka decided to get up. Although if you were dog savvy you could lure her to the side with dog treats. It’s kind of amazing she never got hit by a car.

        1. Clewgarnet*

          My cat used to do that. He ruled the other cats on the street with a paw of iron, to the extent of merrily sauntering into their houses and eating their food in front of them. For a while, he decided to extend his rule to vehicles, too. After being ignominiously scooped up and deposited in our garden a couple of times, he accepted that the cars were not so easily cowed.

  12. Anony Mas*

    I worked at a startup where the unstable owner asked the chief designer to put together a photo slideshow for her mom’s birthday party.

    1. Bee Eye Ill*

      Reminds me of when I worked for a city government and had to help the mayor’s secretary with projects that often involved fundraisers and campaign stuff for his re-election. Big time no-no.

      1. Hazel*

        Me, too! I was working for a state legislator, and we were REQUIRED to work on the reelection campaign during the day, while I was being paid by the state. So wrong!

        I also had to wait at the legislator’s house all morning for the cable guy (or some other repair person), and I regularly took in his dry cleaning and got his car washed. It isn’t completely crazy that someone would be doing those things for him, but it shouldn’t have been me. I was a field rep, (again – paid by the state) not his personal assistant.

        The legislator and his chief of staff were both incredibly sexist and gross. The chief of staff called me “chuleta,” which means “little pork chop,” and it’s not a term that should be said to anyone but maybe a spouse, child, or pet. It’s not how you address an employee.

        After I had been there a while, I found out that I was being paid below the mandated range for that position. I raised hell, and my pay was increased just enough to put me inside the pay bracket.

        This was my first post-college job, and as I’m writing this, I’m realizing how very angry I am that they took advantage of my inexperience.

    2. MusicWithRocksIn*

      Oh – Reminds me of when my boss asked me to re-write her boyfriend’s resume. It was 3 pages of solid block of text. No paragraphs or formatting at all – and all super technical in a way I have no experience with, think I work in Teapot purchasing and this was about operating a wrecking ball. Clearly I brought formatting experience to the table, but I had zero idea how important any of that stuff was or what it meant.

  13. TheyThemTheirs*

    I was once fired because I refused to upsell a BLT to a lady who wanted a grilled cheese. I didn’t, the person working to me next to me asked me about it, I explained she didn’t want it. They made me go ask her. I did, and explained and came back that she didn’t want it. I stopped getting put on the schedule after that.

    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      As a grilled cheese devotee, I doubt if the upsell would have worked. We are pretty dedicated to our sandwich choices.

      1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

        Yeah, a BLT is not an upgrade from a grilled cheese. Grilled cheese with bacon and tomato inside, maybe.

        1. PolarVortex*

          But even then, it’s not a ‘true’ grilled cheese. Don’t get me wrong, I love adding things to my grilled cheeses. However it’s not the same as the ooey gooeyness of a pure grilled cheese and most times I just want that.

          2. Princesss Sparklepony*

            How do you feel about grilled cheese cooked in a waffle iron? My mom made those when we were kids, they were the bomb. Chewy but still melty.

          1. MoinMoin*

            Wow, what’s it like being wrong?

            To be clear, a BLT is at the top of it’s game. A grilled cheese is at the top of it’s game. But they are very different games.

        3. Worldwalker*

          Go all the way. Grilled cheese with bacon, tomato, and chicken.

          Now I want a Denny’s Superbird.

      2. James*

        My first real job was a grill and fry cook. We had the Grilled Cheese Lady. Sweet older woman, came in every couple of days for a grilled cheese sandwich, fries, and a drink. As far as we can tell she’d been doing it for decades. We all knew her and would throw a grilled cheese on as soon as we saw her come in.

        If we’d have tried to up-sell her anything it would have gone badly.

        1. PolarVortex*

          well now I have a new life goal. Grilled Cheese Guy. Sounds like a great life to go out to get a grilled cheese every week. Although I’m probably already chocolate chip pancake and bacon guy at my local diner.

          1. Roy G. Biv*

            There is something to be said for being the “food item of choice” guy at your local diner. I can order for my husband and daughter, based on their unwavering choices, but at least two of the wait staff already know what they want when they see us walk in. I am the only wild card.

            1. La Triviata*

              Early in my working life, I used to treat myself to lunch from a Chinese restaurant. I’d always order the same thing. I changed jobs and didn’t go there for quite a while, at least a year. I did go back, placed my usual order and the person taking the order looked at me and noticed I’d cut my hair.

              1. JustaTech*

                I once went to a New Year’s Eve party at my husband’s coworker’s house and one of the other guests looked at me as I was leaving (as I put on my distinctive hat) and shouted “three quarters of a shot caramel macchiato girl! What’s up?!”

                Yeah, I got recognized by the barista at a party.

                1. Beehoppy*

                  My dad and I go to a diner in my small town a couple times a month. One summer I was selling souvenirs for a sold-out One Direction concert in a baseball stadium at least 40 miles away from the restaurant. Tens of thousands of people there. Waitress from the diner came through my line and immediately said “Do you live in smalltown?”

              2. Lady Diania*

                I’m my husband’s 3rd wife.

                He and his first, and their kids, used to eat at a Japanese place in their mall, regularly, for years. They divorced, he moved away, returned with wife 2. They go in to eat, he orders, guy recognizes him, then looks at him, then at wife 2, and goes “not the same one!”

                Years after THAT, probably 10 years at least after the original visits, we go in. He recognizes hubby, chats, hey, how’s it going! Starts to rattle off the original orders, double takes when he looks at me, and kind of shrugs.

              3. PhyllisB*

                That reminds me of a Chinese restaurant I frequent occasionally. We used to go every week when our kids were little. For various reasons we didn’t go for a couple of years, then my husband and I went for Sunday lunch. They remembered us!! And asked about the kids. I was amazed.

              4. allathian*

                This rings a bell. I went to the office yesterday for the first time in 18 months, and grabbed a coffee to go on my way in from the cafe in the foyer of my office building. When I ordered my semi-skimmed latte, she apologized for not recognizing me right away, because I pretty much always order the same thing. She recognized my voice, but I was masked, my hair’s grown from just below the ears to mid-back, and I wasn’t wearing my glasses. Both of us laughed about that. If I’m honest, I’m just relieved that the cafe survived the pandemic.

            2. Snow Globe*

              A couple of years ago, my husband and I invited our son (senior in high school) to Denny’s for breakfast on a Saturday. The waitress came up and asked my son in he wanted “ the usual”. Whaaa?

              1. OhNo*

                Hahaha! That just reminds me of my brother, who was in charge of driving both of us to school in the morning, but was terrible about being on time. Every morning he was running late, he’d get a dozen doughnuts from the bakery to share with his class and teacher, and three coffees – one for me, one for him, and one for my teacher that I could use as a bribe.

                He apparently stopped by with my dad one weekend on their way out of town to go camping, and my dad had a very similar reaction. “When do you come here? How often are you running late that the bakery owner doesn’t even ask before she just slings you a box of doughnuts and a couple coffees?”

                1. Working Hypothesis*

                  I’m a massage therapist, and when I was in training our school used the donut trick to teach us to be super careful about turning off the ringers on our phones. A massage therapist absolutely can’t afford to have their phone go off when they’re with a client or it’ll wreck the whole relaxing experience, so they used “donuts for the whole class next day” as punishment for anybody whose phone rang during a class session, to get us used to being careful with them before we graduated and had clients of our own.

                  I figure it must have worked. I did have to bring donuts once or twice during my student days, but I can honestly say that I have only once, ever, in seven years of practice, forgotten to turn off my ringer when I had a professional client… and that time, I got away with it; nobody called before I had a chance to turn it off again after that hour.

                2. Susan Ivanova*

                  A long time ago I worked on a software project with a *very* large codebase. It took over 8 hours to do a full build, so that happened automatically every night and then in the morning you’d pull it down so you’d be making your smaller changes against the whole thing.

                  If you broke the build – checked in something that wouldn’t compile as part of the whole set – everyone would have to work against the previous day’s build until a new one finished. Often that meant they couldn’t do anything as they required the latest build. So anyone who broke the build had to bring chocolate for the entire team. I only had to do it once or twice as my changes were mostly self-contained.

              2. BubbleTea*

                There’s a great and very funny song by Keith Marsden called Doing the Manch, and the opening verse goes:

                I was 18 when my dad first took me to the pub
                And I’ve never ever seen him quite so mad
                “A pint of your usual, sir?” the barman said
                But he was asking me, not dad.

                1. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

                  Note that in many places – especially in Europe – the legal age for drinking beer and wine is 16.

              3. A Library Person*

                My dad ran into his brother at a bar during his (my dad’s) 21st birthday celebrations. My uncle was sitting there drinking a beer, clearly knew the bartender, all of that.

                He was several years younger than my dad.

            3. lilsheba*

              I miss having a local diner. We used to but because of the pandemic it shut down and now the building is torn down and a bank is going in it’s place. Like we need another one of those.

            4. TootsNYC*

              I went to order the Chinese takeout for our family once, after not having been in the restaurant for a long time.

              I ordered, and the woman said, “Don’t you want another rice?” No, I said. “are you sure? You should have another rice.” No, no, thanks anyway.

              I got home and my husband said, “Didn’t you get another rice?”

              she’d recognized me and tried to save me from myself.

              2. pancakes*

                Reminds me of the Bakoon “hot boy” tweet:

                “ordered from same chinese delivery place for years. when i would call i would hear the lady whisper ‘its hot boy’ because i liked it spicy.”

            5. socks*

              When I worked at a fast food place, we had a chocolate milkshake guy. Every weekday morning at 7 am he would buy a large chocolate milkshake (whipped cream, no cherry).

              My dad was also Specific Order Guy at a McDonald’s by his workplace. At some point he wanted to change up his order but didn’t because they always started cooking his usual when they saw him pull up.

              1. Worldwalker*

                I was the “custom spinach salad gal” at a mall deli — I paid extra to get mine with extra eggs, and the big midveins pulled out of the spinach leaves (this was before baby spinach was a thing). But I ran the arcade across the mall from them, so they pretty much knew me anyway; all of us on that side branch of the mall did.

                It’s been 30+ years, but I miss their spinach salads. Mine are never that good.

            6. bkanon*

              The Subway a block from my apartment knew my order to a T and would start on it the second I opened the door. One day a corporate person was there and started to correct the worker for not asking me questions. He got a very stern ripping from me on the excellent customer service I got there and his personal idiocy. I ordered the exact same thing twice a week for five years. No, it was not going to change.

              1. Marillenbaum*

                I used to have a favorite Thai restaurant in my old town. The restaurant was inside the Harris Teeter, so I would call in my order, go to the HT, and buy a few odds and ends before picking up my usual order. One day, I called, and the exasperated owner says “We have other dishes, you know! Things you might actually like!” and I had to explain that the promise of this spicy chicken pad Thai was the only thing that had gotten me through my workday and I just really needed this right now.

              2. just a random teacher*

                I used to stop by a Carl’s Jr. very early in the morning when transferring buses on the way to work. (Due to the vagaries of the local rental market, I had a 90 minutes each way bus commute and needed to be at work between 7 and 7:30.) After a few weeks I could just sleepily blink at them and they’d ring in my order for me. On the rare occasions it was a new person and I had to actually remember words before coffee it really threw me off.

            7. Apt Nickname*

              There’s a fantastic Indian restaurant with a lunch buffet near our house. I didn’t realize how often we’d eaten there until I met my husband for lunch during a school day and the host exclaimed “Oh, no kids today!”

            8. Third or Nothing!*

              I inevitably order 2 barbacoa tacos with no cilantro and the green salsa at my local taqueria down the street. Been coming here for 5 years now. The owner knows us by name and just goes “your usual, Third?” when my family comes in. It’s the best.

            9. MAC*

              It got to the point for me that when I *called* a certain place and gave my takeout order, they either didn’t ask for my name, if if they did, they would then say “I thought that was you.” One time I ordered something different and they said “Hey, you’re switching it up!”

            10. Lady Diania*

              Very true. I order one thing only at my favorite local Italian place. Best lasagna EVER. They see me coming, they bring our drinks and start my meal. Hubby rotates a couple things but they KNOW mine. It’s cool to be welcomed like long lost family, every week. :)

            11. Unixorn*

              I waited tables at a Mexican place in college. We had a regular who was _very_ particular about his order, but we’d all fight to get him seated at our tables because he was a really nice guy, tipped extremely well and as long as he got his fajitas and a pitcher of iced tea was super forgiving if you were in the weeds with other tables as long as you made sure the pitcher didn’t run dry for long.

              One day he came in with a friend, and the friend grabbed the bill and burst out laughing when he saw Keith’s meal was on it as “Keith Special” – we’d added his order to the computer since the kitchen knew exactly what it meant and we wouldn’t have to spell out all the things he didn’t want.

          2. 2 Cents*

            My son is 3.5 and the guys at the local pizza place around the corner from his nursery school all know him, as we frequently stop in for a snack after a long day of letters, shapes and colors. They don’t know my name, but they know his, his usual order and treat him like a king :D

            1. TootsNYC*

              my son came home from a late-night Chinese takeout run in near tears because he’d arrived just as they were closing, and the guy insisted on firing back up to make his food. He was so touched that they remembered him, and that the guy would go to that trouble for him.

            2. Artemesia*

              The sushi place near my granddaughter’s school is the same with her. It is fun to be with a celebrity diner when we stop by.

          3. Need More Sunshine*

            But only be That Guy when it’s on the menu. We had a rotating menu where I worked and occasionally would have a grilled cheese special – you choose to put tomato and bacon on it too and it was DELICIOUS. But this one cranky Sunday morning regular would pitch a fit if we didn’t have it (or if it was on roaster for lunch, but not ready yet because it was 9AM dammit). You’d tell him “Sorry, we don’t even have the ingredients” and he’d still act like you murdered a puppy in front of him. :(

        2. JustMyImagination*

          Same first real job was a waitress/line cook at a fast family restaurant. We had a regular who called himself “old man pancakes”.

        3. Kathryn*

          We had a couple of customers like that at the burger joint I worked in during the late 90’s! One customer we called The Onion Lady. She wanted her cheeseburger with extra extra extra onions, so many onions that you can’t see the burger beneath them. Seriously, she told us that. So when she came in, you’d ring the order up with “extra onions” and then go tell the kitchen staff that it was for The Onion Lady so they knew to put at least a 1.5″ pile of onions on that burger instead of just a couple of extra rings.

          We also had The Grilled Chicken Sandwich People. They were an elderly couple who came in a couple of times a month who always wanted plain grilled chicken sandwiches, just bread & chicken. As soon as someone spotted them walking (slowly) into the building from the parking lot, they’d yell “The Grilled Chicken Sandwich People are here!” to let the kitchen staff know to start cooking a fresh couple of chicken breasts for them.

          Regulars are the greatest!

          1. Elizabeth West*

            Right? We had regulars who always ordered the same things at Cafe Job. One was a lady who came in on her lunch break. Same sandwich and drink, every weekday. I still remember how to make the sandwich.

            And Senior Discount Lady. We would always point her out to new hires so they didn’t make her ask for it, because she would get pissy if she had to.

          2. Olivia Mansfield*

            I worked at a cafe where a bunch of old guys (the “good ol’ boys”) met to drink coffee for a couple of hours every morning. One of the guys would always check the outside pay phone for spare change, and every day he would come to the register and hold up his findings for me to see: “I pick the phone today, and I find a nickel!” Every day!

          3. HeraTech*

            LOL, I am “the pickle lady” at the office cafeteria! I usually get the same sandwich every day, but even when I mix it up a little I always want extra pickles. <3

          4. Sister Michael*

            On the topic of naming a person’s order… At my job, it’s well known that my supervisor, Albert, likes a particular method of llama grooming and has the team groom llamas in this specific way. It’s an excellent way to groom them and his opinion comes from long experience, but there are other ways to do it that will work equally well, so it’s noteworthy that he has this strong preference, which we follow. It’s such a normal part of our work that we started calling this method the “Albert Special”- not behind his back, exactly, but it was a sort of fond joke that we made when we talked about upcoming grooming appointments. “Oh, it’s the fluffy llama again- better prep for the Albert Special!”
            Because it wasn’t a secret, eventually he heard someone say, “The fluffy llama is coming in tomorrow, I’ll be sure to give her the Albert Special.”
            And he looked very confused and said, “…how do you know about the Albert Special?”
            Of course we said, “Know about it? We coined the term!” and he started cracking up.
            Come to find out, there’s a restaurant near his house where he always orders the same thing and *they* call it the “Albert Special” as well! So there are two Albert Specials in the world and apparently one of them involves sushi.

        4. Loredena Frisealach*

          This was me and my beloved (now closed) Thai restaurant. I tend to have specific orders for specific restaurants, and I’m somewhat distinctive looking. I think the one I’m only doing take out from is starting to recognize me when I come to pick up….

          1. James*

            Reminds me of a place in California. My wife and I used to bring our dog to a local Thai place and eat outside. She got Pad Thai, I got something random, and the puppy would get chicken on skewers.

            I asked them once if they had any objections. The waitress said “Do you know how much business you bring in? We’d give it to you for free!” People would come up and pet the dog, and my wife and I would talk about how good the food was (it’s a restaurant, the folks asked), and would end up eating there.

            1. Hazel*

              I once had a neighbor whose 2-year-old called chicken satay “chicken lollipops.” This kid was clever – the same kid who wore his superhero underpants backwards because the design was on the back, and he wanted to be able to see it.

        5. Le Sigh*

          Awww this is giving me the feels. The barista on my campus coffee shop saw me every day and would start my order the second he saw me. If the line was really bad, he’d tell me to come back later to pay so I wouldn’t miss class. I was broke as hell but I always came back. They were the best.

          I love being that customer and I wanna be grilled cheese lady one day. The pandemic has been hard in so many was, but a thing I realized early in 2021 was that yes, I missed family, my friends, my coworkers, I was scared, etc., but I also really missed my little day-to-day interactions. My dry cleaning lady, the delivery guy who knows your order by heart, the diner server who doesn’t even have to ask what you want — it just felt good to say hi, check in on them, to see them and be seen by them.

          1. SD*

            I’ve been going to this local medical clinic for over a decade – rotating cast of GPs but stable desk admins – and today I called up and they recognised my voice and didn’t even ask for my date of birth to find me in the system. They recognised me going in for a while, but this is the first time on the phone!

            Felt good though.

        6. Margali*

          3 friends and I go out to breakfast together once a month. Our server knows us as the “extra-crispy hashbrowns and extra-crispy bacon” table.

          I still miss my favorite Hunan restaurant that has been gone for 20 years now. I knew they knew us when I went in to pick up 2 quarts of hot and sour soup to go, and the waiter looked at me and said sympathetically, “Oh, husband home sick with a cold, huh?”

        7. Random Biter*

          I worked for years as a server at a Brown Derby. We had names for all of our regulars ranging from the Brandy Alexanders (sweet older couple who, yes, always had brandy alexanders) to Ma & Pa Tups (brought in their own Tupperware to take home not only leftover food but to raid the salad bar, request extra lemon to take home and empty the sugar rack) to the Gus’ Favorites, who would order the cheapest, toughest steak on the menu extra well done and complain about it being shoe leather while ordering one kid’s meal to split among their heathens who were allowed to treat the restaurant like a playground. Good times, good times.

        8. Kesnit*

          My wife and I used to go to Waffle House almost every Saturday. She changed her order, but I always got the double waffle (although I would sometimes change what was in the waffles) and hash browns the same way. It got to the point the servers would look at me and just ask what I wanted in my waffles.

          Now we go to a local diner most Saturdays. Because I am now on a semi-restricted diet (T2 diabetes), I can only get the omelet with certain sides. If I am really hungry, I will get 2 omelets. The servers just look at me and ask if I want a second omelet…

        9. VeggieNoCheeseNotToasted*

          I’ve been Veggie Footlong No Cheese Not Toasted Lady. I got the same sandwich 3-4x a week and honestly kind of got to be friends with Madison and Kenzie. I think they were giving me their employee discount or free avocado or something, that sandwich is always more expensive when I get it elsewhere.

          At a different sandwich chain, the shift lead not only started making my sandwich when I walked in the door, but figured out that I got it without mustard when I was wearing a nice dress I didn’t want to stain, and adjusted accordingly.

        10. Amethyst*

          In my years in grocery retail I had an elderly regular who always sought me out because I was his favorite. Once he found me he’d tell me all about his woes in finding the exact eggs his wife expected him to bring home: a dozen large brown eggs by Land O Lakes.

          No other eggs would do for his lady.

          His tale usually involved visiting three different stores before ending up at mine, in which he’d either inform me of his victory or his utter failure (because we didn’t have them either). Then he’d ask me for advice on how to break it to her. I used to give him all manner of outlandish suggestions: Once it was aliens stole our supply of brown eggs. So sorry. Or highway robbers stole our shipment. Try again in a few days; we should have new stock then. Etc. :)

      3. Mannheim Steamroller*

        The BLT might be an “upsell” if it’s in addition to the grilled cheese, but not in place of.

    2. Can't Sit Still*

      I love grilled cheese and I can’t eat bacon and won’t eat raw tomatoes. I would be quite upset at the attempt to upsell – those are two different sandwiches!

      Back when Baker’s Square existed, I would go in every Sunday afternoon for a grilled cheese with fries, iced tea, and a slice of the pie of the week. Yes, they knew my order and generally which type of pie was my favorite.

      1. cacwgrl*

        You’re my people. I also cannot eat bacon and can’t stand even the smell of raw tomatoes but grill cheese, fries and iced tea are life.

      1. TheyThemTheirs*

        EXACTLY!! I was like wtf? It really worked out for the best as I absolutely hated working there…

      2. Le Sigh*

        I’m not a vegetarian but those aren’t the same foods! I love a BLT but…that’s not an upsell from a grilled cheese. That’s … a different sandwich.

        1. Worldwalker*

          I love BLTs.
          I love grilled cheese.

          But when I’ve ordered one of them, I absolutely do not want the other one instead.

        3. just passing through*

          It’s like upselling someone from a grilled cheese to an egg salad sandwich. They’re not different points on one sandwich spectrum, they’re different sandwiches!

    4. Richard Hershberger*

      Many years ago when I worked in a chain convenience store we would get a monthly schedule of what item we were supposed to upsell each day. Many of the customers were regulars such as the guy who could come in every morning for a coffee and a pack of Marlboro reds. I would have the pack waiting for him when he got to the counter. This is good customer service, which regulars appreciate. Trying to upsell him would have been bad customer service and could have driven him away. I ignored those schedules. I have wondered ever since if there was any discernable effect on the sales of the listed items.

      1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

        To counter this, at places where I know they’re obliged to do this I always accept the upsell. Where I live it tends to be shops rather than food outlets, with for example a multipack of special edition KitKats or a sheet of seasonal stickers. It’s typically £1 or something, and gets another check on their stupid management-mandated chart.

        I always take leaflets when offered, too. When you have to give out 100 flyers in the rain before you’re allowed back indoors, every refusal cuts to the heart, and you absolutely don’t care if the kind person who accepts puts it in the next trash can they see.

        I know I’m perpetuating a stupid system, but it’s solidarity from the days I used to have to do similar, and hated it.

        1. calonkat*

          When I get polite salespeople on cold calls for coupon books and the like, I let them know that I won’t be buying, but I’m willing to listen to the pitch if it makes a difference in their pay. Or surveys where they identify themselves , if I have the time, I’m willing to take the survey. I’ve had those jobs, and it sucks when people curse at you or blow airhorns in your ear. You are broke, took a job, and have to read a script after calling one off a list of phone numbers. Doesn’t make you a bad person or a believer in the product.

          1. Clisby*

            I would probably talk to them for the sheer novelty of getting a cold call from an actual person.

          2. alienor*

            I won’t listen to the pitch, but I do say “no thank you” nicely before ending the call. There’s no point yelling at someone and making their terrible job worse.

    5. HD*

      I would never have made the leap from grilled cheese to BLT. The only BLTs I’ve seen are like, dry white toast, no cheese, and definitely not grilled. A grilled bacon and tomato with cheese does sound good.

        1. Elenna*

          Avocado grilled cheese is delicious! If I ordered a grilled cheese and someone tried to upsell me avocado, I admit I’d be tempted.

          A BLT, not so much.

      2. Le Sigh*

        Have had some really good BLTs with brioche buns, lettuce, tomato, good bacon…and a fried egg. It’s really tasty.

        But yeah, if I want grilled cheese, I don’t want a BLT.

    6. Paris Geller*

      I hate upselling in general, but I don’t see how it could work with food (except for upselling sizes of things like fries/drinks/etc.) If I come in wanting a grilled cheese I want . . . a grilled cheese. A BLT is no substitute, especially since I don’t like tomatoes!

      1. Need More Sunshine*

        Yeah, upselling with food is generally more about getting a bigger size or adding something on the side. Like if someone orders a sandwich, “Do you want chips with that?” works very well. “Do you want a whole different type of sandwich?” does not!

      2. General von Klinkerhoffen*

        I guess maybe if it’s “instead of this totally ordinary grilled cheese, would you like to add side salad / add onions / upgrade to [Cheese Of The Week] for an extra 50c?”

        But yeah, it’s not like you’re selling a house and upgrading from concrete to parquet.

    7. EPLawyer*

      Yeah that would go over very badly with me. I despise bacon. No everything is not better with bacon. If you tried to upsell me a BLT I would be very firm that I had stated what I wanted. My husband wouldn’t even do that, he would just say cancel the order, we’re leaving. If our drinks had already arrived, we would pay for them of course. But we would leave.

      If someone has placed their order, don’t try to upsell them.

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        Thank you! Not only am I a vegetarian, but I don’t think bacon is the massive taste treat everyone thinks it is.

        Now, if you offered some caramelized onions added into my grilled cheese, we could talk.

      2. Le Sigh*

        It’s also weird because it doesn’t feel like upselling (like trying me to get a bigger size). It feels like you’re questioning if I know what I want. if I order a grilled cheese and you come back with “but don’t you want a BLT instead?” my first thought is…what aren’t you telling me? Is something wrong with the grilled cheese? Why can’t I just have what I ordered?

    10. Magenta Sky*

      I got fired once for taking lunch. Exactly one day after I got chewed out for *not* taking lunch. Most insane boss I’ve ever worked for.

    11. Cold Fish*

      I have finally found my people! At least three people have mentioned not eating/liking tomatoes. I have gotten so many odd looks in my life when I’ve ordered no tomato. I don’t know why it’s so unusual.

      BTW there is merit to a BLnoT but it is no substitute for a grilled cheese. However, I would never order a BLnoT because restaurants never cook the bacon enough. Bacon should not be limp.

      1. Coffee Bean*

        I am a “no tomato” person. I will eat pizza and pasta with red sauce. But, the red sauce has to be devoid of tomato chunks. It has to be completely smooth. It’s a texture thing. Which is really difficult to overcome.

        1. Hazel*

          I don’t like tomatoes either, but I get the most shocked stares when I tell people I don’t like mint. I don’t understand why so many people seem to think there’s NO ONE who doesn’t like mint.

          1. The Gollux, Not a Mere Device*

            Sibling!

            I like tomatoes, but dislike most mint things–which unfortunately includes something like 98% of fluoridated toothpastes. And no, I don’t want flavored dental floss either.

          3. Mannequin*

            I absolutely hate the taste of mint & it makes finding toothpaste very difficult. I used the anise flavor Tom’s for years, and recently I’ve found an inexpensive name brand that has a wintergreen flavor, which I can actually stand.

            1. Hazel*

              Because wintergreen is not mint! I forget what it actually is, but it’s not mint. I can only tolerate the wintergreen breath “mints,” but I guess my toothpaste isn’t very minty because it doesn’t bother me (and I do love the anise Tom’s toothpaste!).

        2. SaraV*

          Ketchup, marinara sauce, pizza sauce, tomatoes in a stew, salsa. I LOVE tomato soup with my grilled cheese.

          Do NOT make me eat a raw tomato.

        3. Lady Diania*

          I like tomato raw. I eat red sauce. But my mom finally started pureeing spaghetti sauce because my sister and I picked the tomato chunks out and it drove her nuts. 40 years later, I won’t eat cooked tomato chunks. The texture is just awful.

        1. Cold Fish*

          Oh, weird allergies abound! My nephew has incredible life-threatening allergies. Many I no idea someone could be allergic to before he came into my life. It has really opened my eyes and brought about one of my biggest pet peeves… people who say it is an allergy when it is just a dislike! Oooo, all upset just thinking about it.

          I had no reaction at the doctors office, but when I explained one watermelon related incident, the doctor agreed I should stay way from it. I don’t to refer to it as an allergy but refuse to eat watermelon, and avoid all melons just in case. That is another one that gets some odd looks.

          1. Lenora Rose*

            For me it depends. If I suspect that saying it’s an allergy will force them to deep clean an entire section of the kitchen, I emphasize it isn’t one (eg, I have typed into an online menu, “no onions please. it’s for a kid who doesn’t like them”).

            But I also expect even preferences to be accommodated if reasonable (see above re kid), because what would be the point of offering us food we then don’t want to eat?

            1. KoiFeeder*

              Yeah, I’ve definitely put “allergic to tomatoes, but only if I physically eat a certain amount of tomato- being in proximity to a tomato at any point is fine” on online menus because my tomato allergy isn’t life-threatening. It’s not comfortable, but someone using a tomato knife isn’t enough to set me off.

              But my tomato allergy is a complex thing because it’s one of those “the thing I react to is close-enough to the actual life-threatening allergen in tobacco that it sets me off anyways” things. Heck, I’ll get a reaction from bell peppers, but that one is milder still than tomatoes.

              That being said, the doc doesn’t want me exposing myself to allergens unnecessarily, and I also don’t like tomatoes or bell peppers, so here we are.

          2. Hazel*

            I always thought a melon allergy was common – probably because it was common in my house! My mom is allergic, and strangely, my brother and I developed a melon allergy (real allergy with mouth swelling and itching) at the same time, and we’re not the same age, so…I don’t know why. My melon allergy went away a few years later. So weird.

        2. Susan Ivanova*

          I had a coworker who was allergic to fresh tomatoes and related fresh fruits but not cooked ones. Yes, he does want ketchup on his absolutely-no-tomatoes burger!

          1. allathian*

            Yeah, I’m the same way. I don’t get a severe reaction, but the burning sensation in my mouth and the itch all over is quite unpleasant enough, thank you. I can get away with a cherry tomato or two when it’s not pollen season. Italian food with cooked tomato sauce, or ketchup, absolutely no problem.

      3. Clisby*

        I love BLTs but the only part that should be cooked is the bacon (and it’s OK to toast the bread.) A grilled cheese with bacon is fine; a grilled cheese with bacon and tomato would be an abomination because the tomato would get all hot and squishy and corpse-like.

        1. pancakes*

          Nah, my local diner cooks the tomato on the griddle before adding it to their grilled cheese with bacon & tomato and it’s delicious. Sometimes only a plain grilled cheese will do, but sometimes a variation hits the spot.

      4. Dragon_Dreamer*

        I eat the occasional BLE (bacon lettuce egg) because I can’t stand raw tomatoes. Frying the egg in the bacon fat is nummy!

      5. JP in the heartland*

        I’m even weirder. My husband likes BLTs but I don’t like tomatoes on sandwiches. So I have bacon and peanut butter.

        1. nym*

          Your weird does not beat my mother’s – who cannot stand mayonnaise.
          Tuna fish and peanut butter, anyone?

          To get back to the thread and weirdest things a boss has asked you to do, I had a boss who asked me to house-sit her 20 dobermans when I was a teenager. To be fair, she was a dog breeder, and I was kennel staff – but no, the house-sitting didn’t come with extra cash. It did come with feeding the dogs raw burger and sleeping on the sofa. Would I do that now? heck no. Was it really egregious? nah, not really. And the dogs were sweet, they were bred as show dogs and beautifully trained.

      6. Sopranohannah*

        Not a huge fan of tomatoes either, but 100% on the bacon. I’ve taken to ask for it well done. Still 50/50 if it will be edible.

      7. Lenora Rose*

        I’m the odd one out. I love tomatoes with bacon or cheese but I cannot fathom why lettuce on a sandwich. A salad, yes. a wrap with the right other ingredients (usually caesar and chicken), okay. But trad loaf bread, buns, or bagels should not have lettuce. Or burgers. (my husband laughs because at restaurants I pull out the lettuce snippily from my desecrated burger…. then eat the lettuce. )

      8. Lady Diania*

        WHY do restaurants not get this??? Bacon should be crispy. Very crispy. I order it, specify “the color of my coke” “extra extra extra crispy” “pull it off just before it starts smoking” “if you think it’s too done, it isn’t”.

        I did this in Cracker Barrel a few weeks ago, and on the 3rd try I had the best restaurant bacon I’d EVER had. The server told me she likes super crispy bacon too, and she had them DEEP FRY it for me. It was fantastic!

    14. rnr*

      Oh man, that reminds me of my last day at my retail job (years ago) before I was going to move to another state for my new office job. I was rearranging soap dispensers or something and this new manager comes up to me after I had helped a customer find a specific item, I think a shower curtain? Anyway, he had seen the interaction and he decided that he should lecture me about how I should always try to sell the customer additional accessories, like the separate soap dispenser/toothbrush holder/etc. that were a matching set. I just nodded along while laughing on the inside. Like, dude, even if it wasn’t my last day, you don’t pay me enough for that.

  14. MysteriousMise*

    1: When I was trainee attorney, my firm hosted an annual golfing outing for its (predominantly male) clients. We female trainees weren’t invited to the golf, but were allowed come to the dinner in the gold club afterwards. We were informed that it was skirts/dresses only; non negotiable. Hmmm.

    When we arrived, a senior male partner started clapping and singing “here come the girls” to the whole room. It was as if we were the strippers arriving at some frat party.

    I left not long afterwards.

      1. MysteriousMise*

        It was awful.

        At a Christmas party, one of the female trainees had just passed a certain exam, with exceptional marks. As part of his annual speech, the managing partner (a different person) praised her brains as well as beauty,and then went on to discuss her beauty.

        She left too.

        1. Richard Hershberger*

          My vices include watching What’s My Line, which ran from 1950 to 1967. They commented about any female contestant who was at all attractive, regardless of her job. If the job was completely unrelated to her looks, the comment would be that this was a shame. This talk clearly was regarded as chivalrous. It is very creepy.

          On the plus side, it has been fascinating to watch the shift in attitudes about smoking. In the early ’50s episodes they would light right up. By the ’60s this is nearly entirely gone except for a few guys where it was part of their image (think Groucho Marx or George Burns, with their cigars). But they occasionally were caught finishing up their smoke as the show came back from commercial. I love live television!

          1. calonkat*

            I love that show too. And I agree about the comments on that show and so many others. Bennet Cerf really seemed to have trouble with trying to be funny on the spot, but veering into creepy.

            And my answer to the old guys today who insist that because it was that way in their youth, and they can’t learn a new way of treating other people is that if their brains have calcified that much, they should retire immediately and allow younger people to take over.

            I’m almost 60, btw. Apparently getting more liberal and strident with age.

            1. Richard Hershberger*

              I am the same age, and also far more liberal than in my youth, when in my first presidential election I happily cast my vote to reelect Reagan.

              Bennet Cerf: What I find most remarkable about him is that the president of Random House was a public intellectual. I have no idea who runs it today, and I strongly suspect he is a bean counter. Cerf’s memoir At Random is available as an ebook and worth reading. But yeah, when speaking to women he was a product of his time, and not in a good way.

              1. Lore*

                The current CEO of Penguin Random House worldwide is absolutely a bean counter but also an activist member of the board of PEN America and has ensured that the company gives a lot of time and money to supporting freedom of expression and literacy worldwide, so, could be worse. (In the time I’ve worked there, Jon Meacham was probably the closest to a public intellectual we had on staff…he may still be an editor at large, actually. His comings and goings are a little mysterious!)

              2. pancakes*

                He wasn’t quite as much of a public intellectual after Jessica Mitford skewered his Famous Writers School (a correspondence school) scam.

        2. LemonLime*

          That just reminded me that one time a 30 year scientist was retiring and the married CEO, who had worked with her for many years, was giving the retirement/accomplishment speech and veered off text to describe how beautiful she had been when she had started working with him years ago. Then sensing the room’s mood shift to awkward, he tried covering these comments with how she was still a beautiful mature woman so many years later.
          Like I wanted to scream “Abort, abort! Just get off the topic of how beautiful you find her! Go back to the paper, the one in front of you, the one about her accomplishments!”
          I wish the retirement party had included booze because I needed a drink from shared embarrassment and horror on her behalf.

          2. Worldwalker*

            It is times like that when you wonder if there might be some merit to burqas. Or maybe large cardboard boxes with eye holes.

            Is it really that hard to treat 50% of the population as fellow human beings?

            1. BubbleTea*

              The cardboard boxes should be put over the lecherous, inappropriate commenters, of course, not the people just existing while attractive.

            4. Michelle*

              Sounds like one of those ideas that sounds good from a certain angle (“Now all these men will stop making such a big deal about my LOOKS instead of my ACCOMPLISHMENTS!”) until you realize it’s actually much worse (“Now we’ve turned my physical appearance into such a big deal that I am literally walking around in a cardboard box.”) Instead, maybe the men who can’t handle the very existence of female colleagues should just stay home.

    3. Professional Cat Herder*

      Oh the stories… I was an EA for two insane years for this dude.

      1. Boss wanted to host a 4th of July BBQ for the staff. Except we didn’t have a grill. He insisted that banks just had grills lying around they would loan to customers. So I was tasked with calling local bank branches to get a grill. All the senior staff in the meeting said NOTHING. I called two banks, got laughed off the phone then found an actual rental place nearby and got one delivered.

      2. Insisted I call Delta and tell them to hold his flight because he was running late.

      3. Once when his office was being repainted, he insisted that I hold the drop cloth up behind him so he could sit at his desk to work. For HOURS. The fumes were intense. But the killer was that he had a laptop. He could have literally hooked into any other work station in an empty office but nope, not acceptable.

      1. JustaTech*

        If only your boss could have done what my mom’s boss back in the 60’s would do when he was running late for a flight: abandon his car at departures and let it get towed.

        Thought nowadays that would get you arrested as soon as you got off your flight.

        1. Rachel in NYC*

          I actually got to do that once with a rental car- with permission from the rental car agency. It was sorta awesome.

          1. Magenta Sky*

            Rental car agencies are used to picking up cars from places other than their offices. There’s a standard fee for it. (It’s best if you tell them in advance you’re going to do so.)

            1. Lily C*

              Absolutely tell them in advance! We had a senior partner change his flight home to a different airport, parked the rental in a random lot at the new airport, and never said anything to anyone until we got a call from the rental company after they reported it stolen.

            2. whomever*

              I once rented a car on one of the Greek islands (I think Mykanos IIRC). The rental car guy litereally said that when returning it, just park it anywhere in the village and toss the keys in their mailbox, they would find it.

              I miss the Greek islands.

        2. Susan Ivanova*

          Recently on a car blog, they had an article about cars that went up to auction after being abandoned at airports. Lots of theories were floated about how they came to be there, but nobody was really sure.

          1. Artemesia*

            The guy up the street from us years ago abandoned his car at the airport after he murdered his stepmother.

      2. No_woman_an_island*

        Omg, that just reminded me that a former boss invited us all over to her house to celebrate an event for one of my coworkers. It was a 4th of July theme, so burgers, etc. When I arrived, she informed me she didn’t know how to make burgers, so she got the ingredients but expected me to do it all. But her ingredients were just…meat. She had no other spices in her house. I’m salting the crap out of this meat trying to get some flavor in it. Like, just let me know ahead of time and I’ll come prepared to make a good burger. I had completely forgotten til your comment.

          1. BubbleTea*

            I just laughed out loud so forcefully I was worried I might have woken the baby in the other room. Well played.

      4. Rob aka Mediancat*

        This reminds me of the person I saw referred to once on Etiquette Hell (back when it had forums) whose boss had been in a business meeting in Florida on 9/11 and absolutely WOULD NOT HEAR that his flight had been cancelled and demanded that someone on his staff get him a flight back to Atlanta or they were all going to be looking for other jobs.

        They finally managed to get him to accept a drive back, instead, but apparently he was not happy that his staff hadn’t been able to what was literally impossible at the time, and get him his flight, because he had a business to run, dammit!

        1. Sinister Serina*

          Wow! At least when two bosses at my company got stranded on 9/11 they knew they couldn’t fly cross-country, so they hired a nice car and a couple of guys to drive it and that’s how they got back.

    6. anonymous73*

      Did your company also plan an all men hunting trip each year and tell everyone to keep it secret?

      1. Professional Cat Herder*

        2011 unfortunately.

        There was also the time I got to meet his Russian mail order bride. Oh and the time he had me call his urologist to check the status of his sperm count test.

        1. allathian*

          Ugh. I’m so sorry. PAs don’t get paid anywhere enough for all the gross stuff they have to put up with. Yuck.

  15. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

    I compiled a list of things and wrote them down – and was going to write a book = “Dinner Table Stories – 250 wild tales from the computer world” but decided not to. Even using a pseudonym and with names redacted, I could get sued.

    Although I have related some dinner table stories in AAM.

    1. The Dogman*

      Put “And in the fevered dreams tom had he…” then put all the details in perhaps?

      Or whack a “No similarities to persons living or dead…” etcetcetc in there maybe?

      1. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

        No, some of the circumstances were so unique that people would see themselves in it.

        I had a lot of other weird things happen as well, especially in the last two years at my long-term job. But you know how I got around it? Mentally/spiritually?

        – you assume it’s a game they’re playing with you. When someone’s playing dirty with you, play back. If you’re smarter than your management, you’ll win.

        – managers don’t mind dissent, or private discussion. But often they paint themselves into a corner. The best way to handle that, is to give them a chance to escape, to back away, without them losing face. It may not always work – very often, managers “stick to their guns” even if it means disaster for the enterprise and personal professional degradation. But you want to avoid that.

    2. Mental Lentil*

      In her book on writing Bird by Bird Anne Lamott always said to include the fact that he had a really small penis, like an egg in a bird’s nest. They will never come forward.

    3. Meep*

      Hmmm. I thought I could write a book about this one horrid coworker. Then I realized the villain was my boss (not that she didn’t have her own book of “Unqualified Talk Therapy”). I was totally thinking about writing a book about the experience, but now I wonder…

      Though, I suppose she is too lazy to read it and too cheap to hire someone.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        If a male colleague said “Clever girl” to me, I’d claw his face off like the velocirapter I am.

        1. Princesss Sparklepony*

          It could possibly be gotten away with if both colleagues were Dr Who fans. It was a thing for a while I think when Matt Smith was the Doctor and there was the Impossible Girl….

  16. ABBBBK*

    I had a part time “internship” during college with a lady who ran a non profit. She ran it out of her house and had intense allergies so she asked that I use non-scented body products and switch to non-scented detergent for my clothes. That all seemed fairly reasonable.
    But my clothes were old and held smell, so then she asked that I change into some of her daughters clothes when I got there. um…..
    And that still wasn’t good enough, so she asked that I shower upon arrival….
    …..and then shower…again…

    I can’t believe I did all of that for a part time (unpaid) internship with a nut. I was so uncomfortable showing in her bathroom then putting on her daughter’s clothes. But I was young, and perceived authority is powerful!

        1. ABBBBK*

          Yes, the daughter was alive, but I think I remember that the clothes were more like her daughter’s rejects. Some cargo shorts and a tshirt type of outfit. And the double showering only happened once, but I went to her house twice a week for much of a summer, so changing clothes and sometimes showering happened a lot. uurrgghhh. what?! why?!

    4. I’m screaming inside too*

      Oh wow. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing you see presented in crappy sitcoms as if it’s totally reasonable, where everyone has a big laugh about it at end and no one ever questions how unreasonable it truly is. (And as a semi-related aside, can I just say how glad I am that “Kevin Can F**k Himself” was renewed for a second season. Seeing how it skewers those terrible sitcom tropes is so much fun.)

    6. Tara*

      Did we have the same boss? My lady (non profit, working out of her house, strong scent sensitivities) asked to sniff my hair, clothing, and armpits during the job interview. And switch to non scented products.

    7. Purple Cat*

      “But I was young, and perceived authority is powerful!”

      So many people writing into AAM need to remember this. Looking at you Grave Note Leaver. The people who take advantage of young professionals are the terrible people.

    8. JB*

      There’s a Sherlock Holmes story a lot like this. The daughter didn’t happen to be locked in the attic, did she?

    9. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Are you my friend A2 from college? She had an internship with someone like that, couldn’t use fabric softener. I don’t think she lasted more than a month there though.

  17. DeepAnon*

    The year before I went up for tenure at a state university, the other professors in my discipline insisted that I announce that I’m trans and queer on the first day of classes so students could decide whether they wanted to take my course.

    The union rep in the meeting didn’t see anything untoward about that.
    My own sense of propriety was so skewed by the place that I actually did it.

    I’m better off in a job with more money and low prestige now.

    1. middle name danger*

      Ah! The old “we are totally inclusive and respectful but we demand you out yourself to serve our purposes” routine.

      1. LilyP*

        And not even the fake-woke “you need to out yourself so we can take credit for having ~~visible~~ LGBTQ staff” but just straight-up “you need to out yourself so students can discriminate against you more efficiently” :O :O

          1. DeepAnon*

            Can confirm! Before taking testosterone, I was criticized for not doing enough for students, no matter how much I worked with students’ particular situations, provided snacks at office hours, etc. After my voice started to deepen, any concern at all I showed for students’ well-being was seen as heroic levels of nurturing.

    2. Mostly managed*

      Did they make homophobic professors announce they hated gay people on the first day of class so you could avoid them? (Somehow I doubt it!)

      1. DeepAnon*

        The most homophobic one was also gay. So, no.

        (I did get tenured, but only because folks on the university personnel committee noticed that these colleagues stopped rating my work as “stellar” and started rating it as as “concerning” about two months after I started taking hormones. Only to get laid off during a budget crisis.)

      2. Worldwalker*

        They wouldn’t have to make them; those people would be happy to do it voluntarily. And do.

  18. Hotdog not dog*

    I was asked to give a daily hormone injection to my boss’ wife (they were trying to get pregnant). She couldn’t give herself the shot in her own butt, and he was afraid of needles.
    (To clarify, he expected me to go to his house daily, on my own time, and give her a shot in the backside.)
    As far as I know, they still have no children.

    2. Expelliarmus*

      They probably still have no kids because he keeps asking his employees to administer the injections!

        1. Teekanne aus Schokolade*

          Nah..also someone struggling with infertility here and if they’re that selfish and feel okay inappropriately manipulating positions of power to get what they want, they may make bad, bad parents.

        2. Dream Jobbed*

          They’re being sarcastic about an employee being asked to do an incredibly inappropriate task on the employee’s own time. This is entirely about those horrible people, not infertile people in general. I’m guessing many of us would go to a neighbor to inject them, but I would not do it in the workplace. (And if you are dealing with infertility, all my best energies are heading your way for a happy conclusion.)

        3. KoiFeeder*

          My infertility is more mechanical than hormonal, so maybe I don’t get a say here, but I’m okay with that comment. Their lack of offspring in this case is directly tied to their bad behavior (demanding employees perform unreasonable tasks). Also, as per Teekanne aus Schokolade, these people don’t sound like they’d be good parents if they ever succeeded!

        4. Web Crawler*

          I agree. Even if you believe this couple deserves it (and yeah it sounds like they’re terrible), you’re using the same rhetoric that gets used to hurt other infertile folks.

          Basically, you’re mocking them for being infertile. And that couple’s never gonna read this, but a few commenters will see this and wonder- “is Darwin also applauding my lack of ability to have biological kids?”

          1. pancakes*

            I doubt that many people will in fact imagine Charles Darwin is frowning upon them from a peculiarly busybody-centric afterlife. Either way, people who imagine the disapproval of long-dead public figures has some bearing on their actual lives are people with bigger problems than that comment.

          2. Worldwalker*

            Not mocking them for being infertile. Mocking them for being boundary-violating, unreasonable people.

          3. Anonymousaurus Rex*

            I agree with this. It’s more that infertile people (like me incidentally) are told in all kinds of ways that we are just not “meant” to be parents. This comment reinforces the idea that you deserve to be infertile if you behave this way, and so people who are infertile logically feel the opposite is true–I must’ve done something to deserve this. No doubt this couple is awful–totally unreasonable and they have way out of touch work boundaries–but it’s pretty unkind to applaud a medical condition that can be hugely traumatic in its own right.

            1. Lenora Rose*

              Lots of infertile people do not remotely deserve infertility and would be excellent parents if biology were just. And it is a tragedy.

              And some parents absolutely do not deserve fertility or children, and this is even worse because now there are kids who suffer for it.

              And some people. like this couple, demonstrate by their actions why we breathe a sigh of relief they haven’t made it into that second group.

        5. Worldwalker*

          Why?

          The issue is not their infertility — the issue is their incredible violation of norms and boundaries.

          It would be equally awful if the shot was for any other purpose. And equally good that such people did not procreate.

        6. RebelwithMouseyHair*

          Please, this is not about infertile people, it’s about entitled people who think employing someone to make hotdogs means you also have someone to do all sorts of stuff including medical procedures for intimate reasons.

        7. JSPA*

          Why? They’re not narcissistic (or bad parent material) for wanting a kid, or for needing injections to procreate.

          They’re boundary pushing jerks for asking one of their employees to

          A) administer medical treatment without a license (and without insurance)
          B) do it on their own time, uncompensated
          C) do said treatment in a way that makes them engage with someone’s exposed ass

          We’re not wishing ongoing infertility on them as some sort of punishment. We’re saying that they’re boundary stomping jerks, and boundary-stomping jerks make bad parents, as well as bad bosses.

      2. Hex Libris*

        This comment doesn’t really make sense, they’re not infertile because they’re having mechanically incorrect sex or anything. And it’s not great to be celebrating a difficult medical condition, even for these people.

    6. Dust Bunny*

      We once x-rayed our boss’ (at a veterinary hospital) kid’s (kid was about the size of a golden retriever) broken arm to see if it had healed, but it was the boss’ idea and did not involve dropping trou.

      1. NopityNope*

        I LOVE that instead of pegging the kid as “about 6 years old” (or whatever), you went with the comparison to a golden retriever. Kinda made my day!

      3. Mannequin*

        Reminds me of when I sprained my ankle very badly at the time I was working at a veterinary hospital, and the other techs did an X-ray & had the Dr check it out to make sure there wasn’t a fracture.

    7. AnonyNon*

      My husband’s boss bred dogs as a hobby. When she found out we were planning on having kids, she offered to have her veterinarian do a sperm count for him.

      2. Anon33*

        Actually that is a thoughtful offer. Sperm count and motility are key indicators of male fertility. If the boss was having regular checks for the dogs it would be much cheaper than a human clinic. Still a bit icky; how is the sample to be maintained at body temperature?

    8. Anonymousaurus Rex*

      As someone currently in the middle of doing these shots myself–WTF? You can absolutely give them to yourself. It’s intimidating at first, but definitely not impossible. They even make auto-injectors that make it easier when you’re at an awkward angle trying to inject your own butt. I can’t fathom the idea of any of my wife’s *colleagues* doing this for me. YIKES.

      1. Irish girl*

        All my injections for IVF were in my abdomen or thigh. I couldnt do it myself so it was my husband and mom. I could have gone to the clinic at work and have a medical professional do it if needed, but never ask a co-worker to do it.

      2. Mannequin*

        I had a blood clot a couple of years ago, and the first week of treatment required me to inject a blood thinner into my belly fat 2x a day. I absolutely HATE needles (total body horror/squick medical trauma from a million ER visits growing up) and I was still able to get it done because it was important!

        1. allathian*

          For myself, I imagine that injecting into fatty tissue would be less intimidating than having to hit muscle. Many T-1 diabetics learn to do it at a very young age, my cousin did it when she was 10, her parents checked the dosage, but she injected herself.

  19. Bend & Snap*

    My employer asked for the phone number to the resort I was going to be staying at on my honeymoon (no cell service).

    I was an entry-level PR coordinator at the time. There’s no reason they would have needed to call me. I actually laughed when they asked me.

    1. TheyThemTheirs*

      Absolutely not. I’d have given him 999-999-9999. Please tell me you got away without him calling you?

    3. No_woman_an_island*

      Yikes. I thought my boss was bad for getting into my employee file, finding my parents’ number (emergency contact) and calling them about a problem while I was still ON THE FLIGHT to their house. They greeted me at arrivals and said call your boss, she needs you.

      1. Meep*

        OMG. I have a coworker who cannot fathom anyone else taking a vacation and has the nerve to text me in order –

        6:30 PM Day Prior: “I haven’t forgotten you are on vacation tomorrow.”
        7:30 AM Day Of: “Will you be in the office today?”
        8:30 AM: “Hey. I need you to call me.”
        9:00 AM: *tries to call me to complain about her personal life and nothing work-related*

        Like clockwork, every time. I have given up responding to any of it when I am on vacation. Everyone else, I will pick up for. Not her.

        Still, the most invasive thing she has ever done is go into my personnel file to get my new home address to Internet stalk it. (There are no Zillow pics, fortunately.) Which I mean, is beyond creepy, but at least only I have to deal with her acting like a creep.

    4. Global Cat Herder*

      Same thing happened to me! My boss said that when he asked “where are you going on your honeymoon?”, saying “Acapulco” was not an acceptable answer, he needed to know which hotel, just in case he needed something while I was out. I too laughed, thinking it had to be a joke.

    5. lizzay*

      At some meeting we had a few years ago, it was suggested that we print out a list with everyone’s cell phone on it, so as to make it easier to call us at home or on vacation if there was an issue. I responded (probably too quickly and/or loudly) with a NO. If the company wanted to pay for my cell phone, then fine, plus that removes some of the psychological block for calling someone who’s not at work. The list was never made.

  20. Neosmom*

    Many years ago, I got a job as a receptionist / admin at a commercial air conditioning contractor through my contacts at the Data Processing Management Association (now named the Association of Information Technology Professionals). Both the company president and I were members. Company president asked me to break the law and install Microsoft Office software (from the one license he purchased) onto all of the company’s PCs! I told him no, I would not be doing that. I sincerely hope it was an ethics test and not an actual request to violate licensing / copywrite law.

    1. Elle*

      My horrible boss had us using TeamViewer free version for commercial purposes. I considered turning them in when I quit.

    2. anonks*

      Yeah, when I took over an IT position my predecessor handed me a flash drive that they had loaded with an old copy of Office (like early 2000s old- this was 4 years ago). He said that the leaders wouldn’t pay for licensing so this is what we used to install Office. Uh…. no. They were paying for licensing shortly thereafter. So many people don’t think software theft is serious!

    3. ferrina*

      I worked with a C-Suite who would pass around his log-in credentials for our data collection software because he didn’t want to pay for extra licenses. We would have happily reassigned the license, but he didn’t feel like going through that process (i.e., send us a message and it will be transferred within a day).
      Eventually he was hacked, the hackers got his log-in credentials that he’d been passing around, and they downloaded a bunch of data from the data collection software.
      Oh, and this was at a tech company.

    4. Elsewhere1010*

      I once worked at a law firm that ran tons of unlicensed specialized programs.

      The firm’s specialty was intellectual property.

  21. Salad Daisy*

    I worked at what was then one of the Big 8 accounting firms. The senior partner called me into his office one day and told me he had been prescribed eye drops by his doctor and was unable to put them in by himself. So every few hours I had to go in his office and put eye drops in his eyes!

    1. Supernonymous*

      I currently supervise an employee, and the first thing this person did when they met me was to request the exact same of me.

      This was in December. So I awkwardly explained that that would violate our workplace covid policies….

    2. Scrooge McDunk*

      I was a shift supervisor in a call centre. One day my boss made me flush out another employee’s ear with Crisco every hour, on the hour, because she had gotten a foam earplug stuck in her ear canal. This wasn’t an on the job accident, mind you, he just didn’t want to have to find someone to cover the other employee’s shift while she stayed home having her ear flushed out.

      3. Lady_Lessa*

        I hope it was oil rather than solid shortening. I only think of Crisco as solid, and for sure wouldn’t want someone to melt some into liquid for the task.

    3. RabbitRabbit*

      Admittedly I did do that a couple times for a colleague, but she was in her late 60s with significant arthritis in her hands and sometimes had trouble with the bottle… but again, that was maybe 2-3 times over the course of years.

      And we worked in an ophthalmology office and I did that for patients on a daily basis anyway, so putting a couple drops in a colleague’s eyes wasn’t a big deal.

    4. Can't Sit Still*

      Oh, this reminds me of the boss who had chemotherapy for skin cancer on her face. It made the skin on her face peel off, basically, so she had to put this liquid film on, but we, her direct reports, had to cut it up and put it on her face.

      I still preferred that to working on her Sunday school lessons.

      2. whomever*

        I, um, confess I’ve sort of been that person. I bike to work and one day skidded on a bunch of gravel and fell. It stung a bit, I swrore, and got back up and continued into work. It was only when I got into the office I noticed that the sting was road rash down basically all of one arm (it really didn’t hurt much). My boss ended up bandaging up for me, but in my defense he offered, I didn’t ask!

        1. Sinister Serina*

          Hah-I had a colleague who professionally raced bikes on the weekend. He came one Monday with bad road rash on his shoulder and hard for him to reach (and it was large-all over his shoulder and back). Yes, he asked me to change the bandage and ointment and yes, I did it. Sigh.

          1. IndustriousLabRat*

            I’ve been asked to give someone stitches at work. No, I am not a doctor or even healthcare adjacent… Figured it should get its own post due to how freaking crazy the situation was…

    5. CatWoman*

      I volunteered to put the drops in my boss’s eyes after he had cataract surgery. Said boss was a complete bastard, and I got tired of watching him flinch and miss his eye and whine about it. I got a measure of satisfaction from holding his eyes open and SPLATTING that drop right in there with no warning AT ALL. Good times.

  22. Akcipitrokulo*

    In my defence, I was young and it was my first real job…

    I was an admin type/general assistant at an estate agents in London. Pretty exclusive, renting expensive central london properties to the likes of high up embassy and bank staff. Small firm, two partners ran it.

    On my first day, one partner took me out to show me ropes, and a tenant was leaving a furnished flat, and doing check out inspection.

    In front of the tenant, he got me to go onto bed, and on hands and knees sniff it all over to make sure it hadn’t been soiled.

    3. Akcipitrokulo*

      It was bad for me… tenant was also so embarassed! She was not that much older, mid-twenties I’d guess.

      I also have suspicion he wouldn’t have done that if she were white :(

      3. Mannequin*

        Just when you think it can’t get any worse, racism comes screeching in yelling ‘hold my beer’…

      6. allathian*

        Reminds me of my first job when I was a senior in high school. I worked at a small grocery store, and when we were filling shelves, we were told to follow any Roma who came in, especially the women, in case they stole things and put them in their skirts. This seemed normal in the late 80s and early 90s, now it would be unthinkable.

      1. Artemesia*

        No one should be renting out a place with a bed to be re-used for next tenants that doesn’t have bed bug covers on all the mattresses. i.e. bedbug and liquid protection.

        1. Mannequin*

          I lived in a legendary set of shithole apartments in Hollywood 30 yrs ago and even THAT junk heap provided furnished apartments with new, albeit cheap, mattresses for each new tenant.

          This was nothing but an assh@le power maneuver on the part of this slimy excuse of an ex-boss, who knew damn well what he was doing.

    5. AnonInCanada*

      Ewwwww!

      The further down this thread I go, the more disgusting these stories get. What’s next? I dread hitting SUBMIT to get the next batch!

  23. Elle*

    Boss and I were driving to a meeting where we would be presenting information to field staff. The boss was driving, and he asked me to open the laptop and add a specific topic to my part of the presentation, with its own new slide. During the presentation I got to that slide and said the things he had asked me to, and from the back of the room he interrupted me to go on a rant about how that was a stupid thing to say and he couldn’t believe anyone would ever take the time to talk about it. It was so mundane and banal that I don’t even remember what it was, but boy do I remember the mortification. That boss also had a policy of never firing anyone and just making their lives hell until they quit on their own because he thought that was the more compassionate thing to do (he had a whole story around this that made it clear he just didn’t want it on his conscience). I legitimately had PTSD from that job that has taken me years to get over.

      1. Richard Hershberger*

        “I totally agree. That is totally stupid. I didn’t want to say anything when you told me to put it in, but I am so happy to clear the air now.”

      2. Elle*

        I don’t think so, no. After I had been there awhile I started calling him out on things gently – “Did I misunderstand, I thought you told me to do X this morning?” Which got me nowhere. Eventually I got bolder, doing things like replying by attaching the email where he’d told me to do the opposite and saying, “I did this because you told me to yesterday – see attached.” That’s when he got aggressive with me instead of just humiliating me. humiliating people was common practice, and he often tried to make up for it by buying us presents.

        My final straw was a Friday afternoon when he called me into his office with another colleague and berated me for 45 minutes about how I was, “letting our customers down.” He had a sheet of paper in his hand that he said was a list of mistakes I’d made but refused to let me see it and could only give me two examples (a minor typo early in my training that I had immediately corrected, and a time a customer asked me a question I didn’t know the answer to and I had followed up with an answer the next day after I looked into it). My poor coworker was absolutely blindsided and horrified and called me later to apologize. That afternoon was the closest I’d ever been to offing myself. On Monday morning I submitted my resignation via email detailing things like how he was unable to provide a job description, withheld a company car for 6 months despite that being part of the written job offer, etc. At noon I became locked out of all software without anyone speaking to me, so I left.

        It’s a very small industry, so I am still a customer of this organization (there are no alternatives) and he has since tried to get me to join the board (it’s a very small nonprofit). It took me nearly four years to stop having an anxiety attack when I saw a vehicle of the same make and model he drove.

        1. Meep*

          Oh my. That is absolutely horrible.

          I have PTSD from a similar situation with a boss (though not a big company so she couldn’t do half of this crap) last year during COVID. I still haven’t a clue what is real and what is not because she was constantly trying to make my life an absolute living hell. She isolated me and would scream at me for trying to talk to anyone. I drove home every day (because she didn’t care about COVID safety – I was the only one ever expected to be in the office) in tears contemplating running my car into a wall right then and there.

          Luckily, my coworkers and family pulled me out of it. I am a masochist so I still work for the same company* and she still works there, because the owner is spineless. But I am in therapy now and she is not allowed to ask me to do anything at all. Not even bring her a pen. She still tries and it frustrates her that she can’t, but I have my power back.

          *before it was years and years of alternating between “Owner will fire you for this mundane offense if you don’t help me fix this bigger project”/”If I get fired for not getting this done then he is going to make you do it anyway” and “You /could/ leave but at least you know what (kind of abuse) you are getting here.”/”It is going to be worse anywhere else. They will eat you alive.” with a sprinkling of “When someone is dead to me I make sure they end up dead. And this is a small industry so watch your back.” so my sense of self-worth is still bottom of the barrel but I have been working with a therapist and a psychiatrist for 4 months now for PTSD caused by her abuse.

          1. Elle*

            That sounds awful! I’m so glad you’ve gotten mostly away from the nightmare boss.

            That’s one of the worst things about this stuff – when I describe it out loud to people, it sounds like I must be making it up. It makes me feel like I might be losing my mind. I do admit that my last few months I wasn’t doing a lot of work. I couldn’t bring myself to do it knowing that regardless of what I did I would get yelled at – and that I also couldn’t ask clarifying questions because that would also get me yelled at. It made me feel like, deep down, I might not have standing to complain.

            1. Zweisatz*

              Just to validate you, that is classic learned helplessness. You were cut off from any reasonable action so no wonder you just tried to stand still and attract no attention.

  24. kwagner*

    My two first jobs were at a forest preserve and a trampoline park. The trampoline park was riddled with unethical practices, like never allowing workers to sit or lean on anything ever while wearing the special trampoline socks (so basically standing barefoot on concrete for 8 hours), but none of that is particularly unusual, unfortunately. But the forest preserve job was a job for teens through a grant, which means that they didn’t have a ton of work for me to do and often gave me busy work. The worst thing they ever asked me to do was sort through a home depot bucket full of expired batteries and separate out the different kinds. Some of these batteries were leaking or had leaked battery acid and the building they had me do it in had windows that only cracked open. I’m surprised I didn’t pass out.

    1. Ace in the Hole*

      I work at a facility that sorts dozens of tons of batteries per year by hand.

      Even cracked/corroded household batteries are not a serious respiratory hazard… a few bucket’s worth is not enough to create a safety issue in an unventilated room. As long as they gave you gloves and appropriate training on handling waste batteries, that was a totally reasonable thing to do.

      1. kwagner*

        no training and I don’t remember gloves but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt maybe I just forgot

      2. Seeking Second Childhood*

        “Had leaked battery acid”
        I asumed that meant household batteries were mixed in with marine batteies: sealed (or not) lead-acid batteries. Different level of hazard.

        1. Ace in the Hole*

          Different type of hazard, not really a different level of hazard. Lead-acid batteries (even leaking ones) are still not a respiratory concern unless you have a very large quantity. The risk from handling them is skin or eye contact with corrosives that can cause chemical burns. If there were for some reason a large enough leak to cause a problem, Kwagner would have known immediately because it would have caused a painful burning sensation in the eyes/throat long before it reached a point that would cause serious injury.

          My bigger worry in this situation would be the risk of fires from lithium-based batteries. But they didn’t mention any fire concerns, so I assumed they were satisfied with the fire safety equipment provided.

  25. Mostly managed*

    I was an admin assistant, but also put in charge of IT and marketing for a small family run business (this was all, in retrospect, big red flag territory.) The CEO wanted to have red in a new logo, so I photoshopped something up and sent it to him. He said no, it had to be the purest red. Because print shops would ONLY have something in the Purest Red. This wasn’t true, but I was tired of arguing with him. So I redid the logo with the Purest Red, and then (this was my mistake) sent him the design, with the names, hex codes, and RGB codes of each color.

    Boss went nuts, stormed over to my desk, and insisted that Pure Red had the same codes across the board, and that I needed to make the hex and RGB codes the “same.” I tried really hard to explain that I couldn’t do that– the numbers were fixed representations of a color, using two different codes. Boss would not take that explanation, and eventually started threatening my job. So I lied. Sent him an email where all the codes were the “same” and volunteered to talk to any print shops so I could let them know in advance what we actually wanted. (also, several print shops didn’t have “pure” red because they used CMYK, like most print shops do. Sigh.) I was ~22~ and very scared of my boss.

    1. Rowan*

      As a graphic designer, I am so so sorry. But good idea on lying, he would never know the difference. “Pure Red” *rolls eyes*

      1. Mostly managed*

        This legitimately sapped up all interest I had in graphic design– the work is great, but working with people is not

        1. Mostly managed*

          (Oh, and the logo ended up “pure red” “pure yellow” and “pure blue”, and it made me want to tear my eyes out.)

      1. Mostly managed*

        He was sooooo sure that the hex code and the RGB code had to be the same number for the same color. And he was the boss, so he was right. Eyeroll.

    3. The Tin Man*

      I don’t really know color codes…but isn’t that like getting upset that ten in base ten is 10 but in base eight is 12? Just different ways of saying the same thing?

      2. Mostly managed*

        Exactly– and it didn’t matter how many guides I showed him. I was just trying to be helpful! I learned to be less helpful.

  26. Anon for this*

    So in college I worked in a big box store in the US. The job was typical retail mixed with unreasonable demands. Mostly from customers but I recall two things about that job very specifically. It was also my first job and didn’t have a good grasp of my worker rights. Turnover in this job was higher than normal for retail in my area.

    Unreasonable thing 1: I was asked to clock out of the shift but then the manager made us stay for 30min to 1 hour to clean up the store before the actual cleaners clocked in. Being young and not fully aware of my worker rights, I didn’t know this was weird. It was always 3rd shift and the manager STOOD BY THE DOOR AND KEPT IT LOCKED SO WE COULDNT LEAVE.

    Unreasonable thing 2: This was an isolated incident but I did decide to quit after this. I was asked to clean a dressing room that had been absolutely defiled by someone without protective gear or proper cleaning supplies. They expected me to use paper towels. This was basically the last straw. I went to the back and got appropriate cleaning supplies, then gave them my 2 weeks as I was walking past the shift scheduler. I thankfully got pulled from the shift schedule immediately so I didn’t have to go back.

    1. PolarVortex*

      Woof with your unreasonable thing #2. Been there, cleaned a destroyed diner bathroom with bags leftover from holding bred on my hands. Toilet was full of paper towels and other hazmat.

      Rough day for a teenager. (Poor cook ended up throwing up in the other bathroom from cleaning it with me.)

      1. Mr. Shark*

        Worked at a fast food place. The assistant mgr (mgr was not at the job, since this was evening work) said we had to clean up some #2 on the bathroom floor. Everyone refused, so he had to do it.

    4. AnonInCanada*

      I don’t know what’s worse: the wage theft, the forcible confinement (locking the door and not letting you out when you’re off the clock) or having to clean a biological hazard with nothing but your bare hands and paper towels!

      Y’know, this is what they should be teaching in high school, not who won the Byzantine War or the complete works of William Shakespeare. Things to prepare you for the real world. Let’s face it, when was the last time you recited a verse from Hamlet?

      1. American Job Venter*

        Why not both?

        But then I did say “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” yesterday while having a seasonal discussion of ghosts and spirits.

        1. RebelwithMouseyHair*

          Definitely both! literature and workers’ rights and the Marxist take on history. And cooking and sewing and changing lightbulbs and filling in tax forms (what’s known as adulting these days right?)

          But did you hear the one about the little old lady who went to see Hamlet for the first time in her life? She quite liked it, but thought the text contained rather too many clichés.

          1. American Job Venter*

            She quite liked it, but thought the text contained rather too many clichés.

            Okay, that’s funny. :)

    5. Not Management Material*

      I’m so sorry you had to do that!

      When I was in college, I worked for a while at the downtown location of a major fast food chain. One night, about this time of year, a man walked in covered in dirt and blood. He walked right up to the counter, and at first I thought he was wearing Halloween makeup, but he slurred out an order and stumbled into the men’s room.

      My manager followed him, came out and called the cops and an ambulance–the man had been stabbed. Once the gentleman in question was under the EMT’s care and taken to the hospital, my (male) manager made (non-male) me clean the men’s room (no hazmat gear provided, of course).

      This was also the manager who was shocked when I turned down his proposal that I take on more duties for another 30 cents an hour so he could “get me ready” for the company’s management program. He couldn’t believe that I was more interested in finishing my college degree and going for a career in the field I’d chosen years ago.

    6. Working Hypothesis*

      “…the manager STOOD BY THE DOOR AND KEPT IT LOCKED SO WE COULDNT LEAVE.”

      Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, anybody?

  27. BubbleTea*

    I had a live-in role working for a wealthy family, with my own bedroom and bathroom in their house. They asked me to stay elsewhere for the weekend so that they could use my bedroom for their guests. No offer to cover the cost of a hotel room (in the capital city of a European country, when I was earning below minimum wage because I was being provided with board and lodgings).

    They also got angry with me for asking whether my friend, who they allowed to visit me while the family were away, could eat at the house during her one-night stay. Apparently I was being dishonest because I said “eat at the house” instead of “eat the food they had paid for”. I felt like this was obvious, because why would I need their permission for my friend and I to eat food we had bought ourselves? But apparently eating in what was meant to be my home was a privilege.

    I quit that job two months earlier than planned. They were not happy about being left in the lurch. I think they genuinely believed they were good employers.

    1. MeridianShrill*

      “I think they genuinely believed they were good employers.”

      They always do, don’t they? I think it’s mostly because they see themselves as “job creators” and that alone is god tier, nevermind that they are crappy employers who enjoy terrorizing those employees.

      1. BubbleTea*

        I don’t know how relevant it is, but I think I was the first European they’d hired for that particular role. Mostly they hired Filipina women.

        1. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

          Oh, I bet it’s relevant. I bet they try to hire people who are new to the country and feel that they have nowhere else to go.

          I’ve been seeing the same with some of the small businesses, healthcare providers etc. in my immigrant community. Their target audience are older people who barely speak or don’t speak English, are on Medicaid, etc, so their clients aren’t going to make waves or change providers no matter how bad or shady the service is.

          I hate it, and consider it a predatory practice.

        2. Ben*

          It’s relevant. I’ve seen places where upper management explicitly says ‘don’t hire locals who speak English, hire immigrants’ with the very obvious subtext that they want employees who don’t know their rights and won’t be able to communicate their complaints effectively.

      2. Magenta Sky*

        If you firmly believe you’re better than other people, anything you do for them is a tremendous favor, and they should be grateful for your generosity.

    2. The Bimmer Guy*

      Was this an au pair sort of situation? Usually au pairs are treated much better than that. Yikes.

      1. BubbleTea*

        Yes, I was an au pair. They had bought a house for their housekeeper and her husband (the handyman) but couldn’t pay for anhotel for me. I was young and didn’t push back. I would now.

        1. Jh*

          I once interviewed for a nanny position where they had designed and built the house… Including a 10×10 room in the basement for a nanny… They had used the rest of the space in the basement for an extra playroom and another bedroom.. For… No one? One tiny bathroom that wasn’t attached. None of it was terrible, but the fact that they actually designed the entire house all fancy and then specifically chose to make the smallest, crappiest room for a nanny told me all I needed to know. They also didn’t want me to have guests over. Otherwise they actually seemed perfectly nice, but big red flags!

    4. Friendly Comp Manager*

      I had a very similar experience being a live in nanny when I was 19, between my Freshman and Sophomore year of college. I was very non-confrontational at that time, but at some point I had had *enough* of the horrible treatment, so I tried to talk to the mother — and she said, “How you feel is not my responsibility.” Welllllll okay then.

      I moved out while they were at lunch one day without telling them, and called them that evening saying I was not coming back.

      I have SO many stories from working for them … for like 4 weeks.

  28. Albeira Dawn*

    In college I worked in the Admissions office, usually covering the front desk or filing. They only transitioned to digitally reviewing applications in 2020. So the process was: students submit the Common Application and test scores online. Once a week the processing associate would print all of the Common Apps, all of the test scores, all of the letters of rec, etc. Then I or another student would take this big stack of printed test scores and sort them into physical file folders we had set up in milk crates around the office for every, single, applicant. This was a steady 10 hour a week job for me from around September to April. I got really, really, really good at alphabetizing.

      1. E*

        The university I work for has only transitioned to digital processing of applications because of the pandemic. They had no intention of doing so previously.

    2. Cordelia*

      Your user name!! I am also a huge Rude Tales fan and I am loving the crossover here into my fave advice column. What a small internet it is :)

    3. Catnip*

      I feel you!! I worked Admissions at a very small college for a year; they only started reviewing applications online after my insistence when I started in July 2020. Before that, they would sit in a locked briefcase, and Admissions Committee members would schedule times to review them. Even when we did move online, we had no real reviewing software, so I had to manually download documents from the Student Portal and upload them to a shared Google Drive. Our policies also mandated keeping paper records, so I had to print out and file copies as well. Such a pain!

        1. Catnip*

          Yeah, it was a student body of about 100, so incoming classes usually only had 30-50 students (it was a very niche school in a relatively remote area). That said, it usually meant 75-100 apps – a pittance to process electronically, but a nightmare to physically file!

    4. Higher Ed Marketer*

      omg. I work in Admissions for a mid-size public, and I cannot even comprehend what it would look like if we PRINTED all of our applications… Like, we *admit* 18K-20K students each year to get our class — admit, not receive apps from! My two-floor office would be floor to ceiling paper. Committee reports and some specific stuff in specific instances gets printed, but not everything. We thankfully switched to digital a decade or so ago, I believe, which was long before my time here. I’m interviewing for and will hopefully get a new position in the office that would be part admissions recruiter, and if I get the job I will be thanking my lucky stars that all my app reading will be digital!!!

  29. Unwitting Drug Dealer*

    I worked in media at a major broadcasting company and was hired as an admin to support three departments, but was promised to get special projects from the Marketing team. I was excited! It was early in my career, I was young, and I wanted to move up at some point.

    Special projects for the head of Marketing included:
    – Setting up her Brazilian bikini waxes appointments.
    – Mailing prescription anxiety meds through USPS to her best friend–many, many times.
    – Planning her yearly trip to Art Basel in Miami with her fiancé.

    Looking back, I’m pretty sure that the 2nd one was illegal. As I wasn’t hired to be a personal assistant, I didn’t show particular enthusiasm for the job. Got fired. Oh well.

    1. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

      Wow these are special projects indeed! And you’re right, isn’t #2 basically dealing drugs?

      1. RebelwithMouseyHair*

        “Unwitting Drug Dealer” wasn’t actually dealing though, she was just the mule since she was sending them.

  30. Anon today*

    When I was high school (20 years ago) a boss asked all of the female employees (food service) for sexual favors because his wife was pregnant and wouldn’t do what he asked. He told us if we were “nice” to him, he would make sure we got the best shifts and more holiday days off. Someone/something must have been looking out for me because the first customer was my 6 foot, 210 lb. defensive lineman boyfriend and other defensive lineman friends. He never asked me again and got a quick and mysterious “transfer” soon thereafter. Still to this day don’t know why, but I assume another employee told parents or reported him.

      1. Anon today*

        He was super friendly to the manager, introduced himself and his friends and told him they were available for “security” if we got any rowdy customers. I 100% believe someone/something protecting me from him because I got many weekend opening shift with him because I lived so close. I’m sure he would have asked again and possibly force himself on me or fire me if I refused. Sometimes the universe just looks out for us!

  31. PolarVortex*

    Not so funny story.

    Have to deal with an absolute pervert. I was female presenting at the time (I was 19 and looked like I was 14 yo, I got carded buying lottery cards until I was 30) and was more a wallflower personality than the terrier I am now. Guy would come into the men’s clothing part of the store I worked at and would make me help him buy underwear and shorts. (And make him look at the short’s fly to make sure it was laying right because “it wasn’t laying right”) And he’d come back and return them and start the process all over again. There were only two of us in the dept, and my senior coworker (male) refused to deal with him and wouldn’t help me. Nor would the managers because of course he’s just a nice customer who needs help.

    Went on for months until a nice grandmother type coworker was assigned to the dept one day to backfill and he came around. She shooed me off and must’ve put the fear of some deity (or herself) into him because I never saw him again.

    1. Observer*

      Not funny at all. I DO like the part about the “grandmother type” who had more brains and backbone than anyone else in the place. (Not YOUR fault!)

    3. Puh-lease….*

      Ugh… I had several of these types of customers when I worked in a tux rental shop in my early 20’s. Asking for repeated inseam measuring, adjusting waistbands for them, help with “zipper malfunctions”, come out of the dressing room with no pants on… a lot of the time I was there by myself so would just have to say no and hope they didn’t get aggressive (some did, and required security calls!) but when my large male ex-marine coworker was there with me I’d call him over to “help them out”, and suddenly they figured out how to zip their own zippers… just… ugh…

  32. Purple Pen Fiasco*

    Purple pen. I wrote my personal notes (in a personal notebook that I purchased at Target with my own funds, when I was learning my job/my personal training notebook) in purple pen. Purple is my favorite color, and it made me smile to read my notes to myself in purple. Again, no one saw these notes. They were my notes to me alone, and I could pull them to remind myself how to do a process as I was training. I didn’t have to turn in this notebook or anything of the sort.

    My boss came in, screamed that she hated purple pens (this was news to me), snatched it out of my hand, and threw it at me, while screaming. Then she grabbed it off the ground where it landed, and took it into her office. I was flabbergasted. Witness were equally puzzled.

    The next day, she called me into her office. I was scared, as I walked in, and she was holding my purple pen. She threw it at my again (gentler this time) and said I could have it back. She only screamed at me the previous day because her husband forgot her birthday. She then proceeded to sob about how horrible he was and her life was.

    1. PolarVortex*

      What on earth.

      I hope you’re able to use your purple pens without remembering that constantly.

      1. Vimes*

        I once used a red pen for an in class essay in high school because I hated getting corrected in red pen. Teacher got mad at me (reasonable—my handwriting suuuuuucks. Ten pages of it in red pen. Aw, education, no), realized she had never actually forbidden us to use red pen despite the fact that I was being an obvious jackass, and corrected the whole class’ essays in purple for the rest of the year, which was awesome. Thanks Ms. S!

        1. Purple Pen Fiasco*

          I taught as well! I wasn’t allowed to correct in red. My principal said it was damaging to the children and looked like blood all over the page. Apparently I shouldn’t write at all!

        2. Artemesia*

          I used an ink that was called ‘gold’ but was more goldish brown for corrections or if that wasn’t available, green. Lots of kids sort of freak when they see lots of red comments.

        3. Dana Whittaker*

          I was The Crazy Correction Mom when my daughter was in elementary/middle/high school. Every Parents’ Night, I asked how corrections were made. “Oh we don’t like to make corrections – it is disheartening.” I offered to buy every teacher a case of pens in whatever positive and uplifting color they wanted, but I did expect my child to actually learn grammar, spelling, and punctuation at some point.

          Setting: 8th grade Parents’ Night.
          I raise my hand and ask the teacher if this is the year that students will have their work corrected for grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

          Teacher replies: “Oh no – by this point, if the students haven’t gotten the hang of it, we just assume they are not going to ever get it.”

          I do not actually remember my response – my husband said it was like something out of a horror movie, complete with references to the nuns that I had in Catholic grade school. He was just glad we made it out without the police showing up.

          The following year, my daughter’s freshman English teacher described how she spent the first quarter on diagramming sentences, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

          I hugged her. In tears.

    2. Robin Ellacott*

      That is just bizarre and must have been really alarming.

      Once upon a time we had people in my office fighting over all WANTING purple pens. I wonder what hijinks would have ensured if your boss had been introduced to the mix.

    3. Plebeian Aristocracy*

      Seriously, there seems to be something magically wrong about purple pens! There was the pen story in the supply list, and I have watched coworkers getting snippy about “having enough” and “pens disappearing.” This could very much be a me thing—and if they bring you joy, go for them—but I have such bigger fish to fry.

  33. Holly Golightly*

    Once when I was very young, I was asked by a supervisor to take suicidal coworker home with me.

      1. Hiring Mgr*

        Nope.. I had answered an ad in the paper (this was when i was in college, decades ago). The ad was pretty vague but it said something like “get paid cash daily”. I called the guy up and for the first few days I was just driving around doing deliveries, picking up other things, etc..

        Then he calls me one night that week.. asked if had any big friends who could handle themselves, and if I’d every done any collecting.. Then he said if i really wanted to make some big $$, i shoudl round up some of my “big friends” and he’d show us the ropes in collecting :)

  35. Foreign Octopus*

    Working in recruitment, my boss told me to only put forward English-sounding names because the client had, and I quote, “enough diversity”.

    Obviously I didn’t do it and left for another job some time later.

      1. Foreign Octopus*

        Sadly no.

        We were a five-person office and I think he knew that what he was asking was wrong as he was doing this weird hovering thing at my shoulder. I did make a point to send candidates that were absolutely qualified and met all of the visa requirements but had traditionally non-British names in the hope of forcing his hand or the client’s hand into putting something in writing.

    3. HS Teacher*

      I had a boss who your story reminds me of. We had an opening for an account exec, and he had set up some interviews. One of the people who came in ended up being a black female. After the interview, he told me he wasn’t going to hire her because he didn’t need another one. (I’m a black female.) If I had known what her name was or any way of contacting her, I’d have offered to testify on her behalf in the lawsuit.
      I left that job, and industry, shortly afterward. Freaking toxic, racist, homophobic… Never again.

      1. Zweisatz*

        Jesus Christ. Not better by a lot if he had said it to somebody else, but it somehow still makes it worse that he told you directly.

    4. Forgot My Name Again*

      I used to work in a place where the secretary would vet applications for “funny-sounding names” before passing them to the hiring manager. I think she’d confided in me thinking me an ally, and I must have looked so shocked that she quickly backtracked and said “oh, they’re all international applicants, and we don’t have a budget for help with moving costs.” Uh huh. All of them?

  36. Albeira Dawn*

    Oh also I worked in a grocery store bakery department where the store manager regularly got mad at me when the bread displays were empty. While standing in the back where she could clearly see that there was literally no bread for there for me to put out.

    1. Michelle*

      My daughter’s boss gets mad at her when she’s gets all her cleaning done too quickly. On slow days she’ll finish everything and end up standing around, and he’ll get mad and make her re-clean things she just finished with just so she’s “doing something.”

  37. La vie est belle*

    In my first office job as an Admin Assistant, the President of our small company had her office redecorated. She found the new leather sofa looked “too new”. She asked me and a couple of the other assistants to take take turns jumping up and down on it until it looked sufficiently worn in.
    It was a very formal office in the early ’90s, so we were all in skirt suits and pantyhose – not the ideal outfit for playing trampoline on a sofa. Out of the team of 4 assistants, only one (not me!) had the sense to say no. Amazingly, despite it taking a couple of days of jumping to get it to the point she was satisfied, there were no serious injuries. Now many years later into my career, can’t believe I did it and can’t ever imagine asking someone to do that!

    1. SnapCrackleStop*

      Hilarious!
      I’m picturing something like the scene in Sabrina where the secretaries all stand on a plastic board to demonstrate it’s strength.

    2. Mr. Shark*

      This sounds like something that would have been in MadMen, somehow acceptable in the ’60s but wildly inappropriate in the ’90s.

  38. AgentOfBway*

    I once had a boss ask me to create fake user profiles to write positive reviews of a a new part of our business opening m various websites because there were so many negative ones. I was the receptionist.

  39. Jennifer*

    In my first job out of college, my boss asked me to write up the minutes for a meeting I hadn’t attended. I asked her for her notes and she started screaming at me that I never just do what she asks. I tried to explain that I obviously couldn’t recap a meeting I didn’t attend and she stormed away. Turns out she was supposed to be at the meeting but instead was at a hotel room with her grandboss, with whom she was having an affair that EVERYONE knew about.

  40. Gipsy Danger*

    Not me, but a colleague. We worked for a political party, as assistants to elected officials. My colleague’s boss was about to go on tv and she told him that he had something in his teeth. He responded “Well, get it!” – he expected her to pick his teeth for him. To her eternal torment, she did. She mentioned it as the inciting incident when she resigned a few weeks later.

    2. Ally McBeal*

      Ew, oh god, every cell in my body (still traumatized from enduring the first 6 months of the pandemic in NYC) just recoiled in disgust.

  41. That's Just, Like, Your Legal Opinion, Man*

    During my last year of law school, I started clerking at a small practice. It was just me, the legal assistant, and the attorney/practice owner. Part of my job was to prepare notices of service, which are formal notifications to the opposing counsel/party that we had filed a motion or other pleading. Well, one day my boss asked me to prep a notice for a motion that she was filing that day. She then told me to wait THREE DAYS before sending it to opposing counsel (whom she had a personal grudge against) so they wouldn’t have time to file a counter motion. This is a HUGE no no! She wanted me to violate the court rules and the state bar’s code of ethics, risking her license and my future all because she was being petty. I “accidentally” mailed the service the same day I prepped it and quit a few weeks later. Needless to say, she has a horrible rep in our area!

    1. Richard Hershberger*

      If opposing counsel was really on the ball they could save the envelope with the postmark.

      1. NotAnotherManager!*

        Yup. I work with an practice that has very tight turnarounds and service requirement. You don’t serve timely, they will throw it your submission as not filed timely/in accordance with rules. I had a newbie paralegal screw up service entirely by accident, and trying to keep our very important brief in file required an all-parties teleconference with the jurisdiction and a very expensive hand-delivery service to another state.

  42. Listen to your ticketsellers*

    I work in ticketing. My first job was at a small venue with a ~250 seat house. We were hosting a day-long scholarly seminar with several high profile speakers, and sold the tickets as general admission, meaning the audience expected to arrive and choose their own seats. We ended up selling out the house and my boss panicked about how everyone would fit in the space; my suggestion: “Can we just ask them to move down the rows and fill in all the empty seats?” was immediately rejected as lacking professionalism, and he insisted instead on retroactively assigning seats to everyone, one day before the event, without notifying the ticketbuyers themselves we were doing so. I begged, pleaded, and even cried (I was young) about why this was a bad idea, but was told to do it anyways. The day of the event, the first audience members arrived well in advance of the doors opening time to stake out the best seats, and were outraged to be told we’d assigned them a seat without their knowledge and they’d have to sit where we told them. Lots of shouting, utter chaos, several ADA-violations since the retro seat assignments had no way to account for special seating needs, and in the end, when we were running late and desperate to start, we *asked everyone to just move down the rows and fill in all the empty seats*. An entire day of totally pointless work that resulted in us just doing the thing I suggested we do in the first place, but only after making our audience irate.

    1. Worldwalker*

      At the GDC keynote one year, several requests were made to move together, etc., because they had given out exactly as many tickets as they had seats. (special seating needs were separate) People shuffled around a bit but didn’t do much. Then one of the volunteer staff got the mic, and announced “Okay, everyone, defrag the room!” They did. :)

    2. Bugalugs*

      OMG I can’t imagine. I have enough horror stories on working box office and building last minute shows to fill a book. First rule of ticketing don’t screw with the tickets people are very particular about where they sit.

    3. Silence Will Fall*

      I worked for a 400 seat venue in college. We had a well-known public radio broadcaster come in as part of a grant-funded speaker series. Tickets were free and were available at noon on a first-come, first-served basis. By 9 am, there were well over 500 people in line for tickets, so the venue manager decided to just hand out the tickets until they were gone rather than make people wait. A few minutes later, we were “sold out”. This was pre-social media days, so we updated the box office voicemail and put up signs on the marquee and door. Despite this, by 10 am, there were dozens of people lined up. When I went out to let them know that the event was already sold out, these regular NPR listeners turned into a raving mob. How dare we give out the tickets early? They were banging on the box office windows, screaming for a manager. Waving their fingers in my face. One woman threw her coffee on the ground and stamped off. It was awful! We had a repeat performance every 30 minutes or so until early afternoon when people were finally able to gracefully accept that there were no tickets left.

      1. Princess Trachea-Aurelia Belaroth*

        At my university, they had a short stint of high-profile media figures coming in to have a talk with our most famous alumnus, one per year, I think for all four years I was there. The third or fourth one was INCREDIBLY famous, in a different category to the others, and people (myself included) lined up the night before and slept outside (in October, I believe) to get the tickets.

        The university president showed up in the morning to observe, ordered coffee and hot chocolate for us from university dining, and also released all the tickets that were being held for faculty and faculty guests. They also policed the line to prevent people from joining their friends without having waited, and may have counted the line to make sure not too many people joined it and were disappointed.

        Not to say that y’all could have done any of this, it just reminded me of my experience.

  43. Snarkus Aurelius*

    At my very first internship, I had no idea how bad it was. That’s why the Executive Director liked college students who had no office experience. She’d manipulate us and tell us every intern in DC worked 80 hour weeks with no pay and if we didn’t go along with that, we’d never find a job. My internship consisted of planning for some big national conference. One of the reasons I accepted initially was because, hey, free trip to LA as “payment” for my work.

    The night we got there, we had an all staff meeting. The Executive Director, who had a suite of her own, required one of the interns to wake her up every morning at 6 AM. We were like, “What?” I suggested having the front desk give her a wake up call. She said, “No. I need someone to come into my room and wake me up properly with a cup of fresh coffee and the newspaper. Make sure I’m out of bed and getting ready. I’ll give you a key to my suite and everything!” The room was awkwardly silent. Another intern finally said yes, and that poor person DID IT every single day of the conference! I couldn’t believe it. I refused to do it, especially because the Executive Director traveled with her husband and they were sleeping in the same bed.

    The worst part was we weren’t going to bed until 1 AM so all of us were operating on about 5-6 hours of sleep for those three days.

    That woman is dead now, and I do not miss her at all.

    1. La Triviata*

      Place I worked years ago would have a lot of meetings. It was not located near public transit and to get there, I’d have to take a cab. The alternative would be take multiple buses, walk a good distance and leave home unconscionably early … this while us peons were working literally 16 hours a day. The upper level staff had rooms at the hotel and parking for their cars, all paid for by the organization. As were their rooms. And movies. And dry cleaning. Those of us who weren’t important enough didn’t get lunch breaks and couldn’t even count on getting food paid for. When I was told that I had to leave the venue, go back to our office for some materials and get back ASAP, they refused to pay for cab fare. Following that meeting, they decided – retroactively – that they would not pay any overtime unless it had been approved in advance.

  44. Joyce To the World*

    This is all the same boss in a small non profit that used federal funds to operate.
    Made me share a bed with her when we traveled for work. She had a twin size inflatable mattress she would bring and I had to sleep next to her while she floated above me on her mattress. Flopping loudly every time she turned over. Finally had to put a stop to this and insisted on a rollaway bed or my own.
    Also made us sing stupid songs about food when entering elevators with others in hotels. -Also while traveling for work.
    The biggest and final straw was her telling us we had to hide her shady handling of federal funds When we were audited and it started to go south, she left the country for a month and left us holding the bag. We shut it down and made her come back to face the music.

      1. OhNo*

        Agreed, what the what? Did she just secretly dream of having a barbershop quartet constantly giving her life theme music or something?

        1. Joyce To the World*

          She was in the Sweet Adeline’s, basically a female version of Barbershop. We worked with children and she thought it was cute for us all to bust out into our songs and dance movements every time we got on the elevator. It was mainly just humiliating. I started ignoring her prompts to start the “Dog and Pony Show” and pretended like I didn’t know them.

        2. Slow Gin Lizz*

          OMG, like that episode of Scrubs where the barbershop quartet sings in the elevator! I love that one!

    2. Alexis Rosay*

      I also had to share a bed with my boss at a nonprofit retreat she organized. She…didn’t bother to check the number of beds the rental had apparently. No air mattress though!

  45. A Stranger in the Alps*

    Working collections, we had a judgment against someone who owed between $40-70k. We were going to pursue a bank levy to collect the funds, and my boss wanted me to call the bank, pretending to be a creditor, and see if they had enough funding in the bank so we didn’t waste our time. I refused.

  46. Ace in the Hole*

    The award has to go to the customer who demanded I stop controlling traffic to interrupt the firefighters and ask them how much longer it was going to be. They’d driven a whole 10 minutes to get to us and HAD to drop off their recycling TODAY. This was while the recycling center was obviously on fire: smoke pouring out the roof, six fire trucks crowded outside, and all the staff huddled on the street.

    You’ll be shocked to learn that I did not do what the customer wanted.

    1. 3DogNight*

      When working 911 we had a minor flood event. One of our city council members called 911, while our officers, who were out, you know, rescuing people. Council member wanted them to close his road, because when people drove past the water was making wave in his house. Well no $–t-Sherlock, there’s a flood, and you built your house below sea level (not in Louisiana, either).

    2. anonymous73*

      I worked a short stint as a CSR for Comcast internet service. We had 6 weeks of training, which included handling phone calls while our trainers assisted in one giant room. On the last night of training, a big hurricane was spinning through the area. The phones were pretty dead, but I did have one caller who asked why their internet was out. Ummmm, have you looked outside? And after the hurricane, my first week on the phones alone I had one guy ask why his cable/internet was out when he had a generator.

      You can’t fix stupid.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        I’ll never forget the customers calling us asking why they couldn’t fax anything after OldExjob was hit by a tornado during the 2009 super-derecho (the power was out because the pole got snapped in half, and the fax machine was down but the phone still worked). When I told them what happened, everyone was shocked and concerned, asked if we were all right, etc. Except for one woman: “Oh. *pause* Well, when do you think I can fax my quote?” *facepalm*

      2. Ace in the Hole*

        The flip side, of course, was my local power company insisting that my lights flickering whenever it rained wasn’t an issue on their end.

        They said their equipment was weatherproofed, so it must be my building’s wiring. I pointed out that it happened to at least two of my neighbors also – nope, still blamed the house wiring. I called a second time and pointed out that the power pole transformer was sparking every time it rained and seemed to be getting worse over time – nope, not related to the flickering lights, and not a problem either… “they just do that sometimes.” But when I called a third time to tell them the transformer exploded they did finally send a tech!

  47. Canadian Valkyrie*

    1. One of my former managers asked me to clean out an old storage room in a very old building that was in an attic-like space. I said I couldn’t because I have asthma and allergies to dust and would be unable to be in a space with that much work doing physical stuff without becoming very unwell and being unable to breath. She told me to use an inhaler and do it any how and wouldn’t listen when I said that my emergency inhaler wasn’t just going to magically make it totally ok. I was livid because there were absolutely other employees she could have asked who don’t have respiratory illnesses and had me help once the stuff was in another part of the building that wouldn’t cause me to become unable to breath well even with medical intervention and it felt pretty messed up that she would expect me to compromise my health for a menial task that others could have done.

    1. Canadian Valkyrie*

      1. One of my former managers asked me to clean out an old storage room in a very old building that was in an attic-like space. I said I couldn’t because I have asthma and allergies to dust and would be unable to be in a space with that much dust doing physical work without becoming very unwell and being unable to breath. She told me to use an inhaler and do it any how and wouldn’t listen when I said that my emergency inhaler wasn’t just going to magically make it totally ok (better sure, but still not comfortable!). I was livid because there were absolutely other employees she could have asked who don’t have respiratory illnesses and she could have instead had me help once the stuff was in another part of the building that wouldn’t cause me to become unable to breath well even with medical intervention and it felt pretty messed up that she would expect me to compromise my health for a menial task that others could have done.

    2. Bex*

      Ooh, yeah, I got a similar assignment but didn’t have any reason to say no other than that it sounded terrible. The theater company where I worked (in an office job) had been using donated warehouse space for a long time, and now that building was being sold and we had to get our stuff out. Only what we wanted to keep, because the place was being demolished and they would throw whatever was left in the dumpsters (pretty generous, actually!). I had never been there before but somehow got put in charge of the clean-out project, which was very important to the boss, but not important enough for him to, y’know, participate.

      First day, we arrive at the warehouse and it is a mess. Broken windows, bird poop everywhere, no organization, no shelving, piles of stuff just all over the floor, almost nothing worth keeping. We manage to fill the rental truck with potentially useful items, head back and unload, report to the boss that we got everything.

      He tells us that’s impossible. There’s thousands of dollars worth of fabric in that warehouse! The couch from that show he directed 15 years ago! The scenery from whatever other show! He made us go back for two more full days, never came out himself to see that all the precious stuff he wanted rescued was crapped on or torn up by nesting animals, mildewed, broken, or otherwise useless.

  48. Camellia*

    Back when I was barely 21, I lived in Town A and worked full time as a bank teller in Town B for minimum wage, $2 an hour at that time. A man who owned a business in Town A was complaining one day about having to drive to Town B to make his business deposits. My manager told this man that I would come to his house every morning and pick up his deposit from the day before and bring it with me to work. They both thought that was a great idea! Thank goodness that, young and inexperienced as I was, I had the sense to tell them no, I would not do that.

  49. James*

    I was once asked to plug a leak in a sump. It was 4′ down, no ladder, and the sump was of unknown depth and partially full of water. The whole thing was giving off TCE fumes, very nasty stuff. Permit-required confined space, too, which made the whole thing even better, due to the number of laws, policies, and procedures I’d have violated had I done it. I was also literally the only person in the building–it had been evacuated due to the TCE fumes. To fully paint the picture, this is in what I refer to as the Horror Hallways, access tunnels built under a facility in the 1960s and not upgraded since, so it was bad lighting, rats running around in the distance, weird noises coming from the outdated pipes…. Fortunately when I presented these concerns (well, when I explained my response of “Yeah, not gonna happen, this is insane”) my boss was 100% on board. He hadn’t realized what all this would entail and agreed I’d made the right call in pushing back.

    I also once had a safety audit that resulted in tripling our paperwork. Nothing got any safer, but boy howdy did we document it not getting safer! Lost a LOT of respect for that safety officer.

    Another time….This was was reasonable, but seems absurd from the outside. Two of us were doing a site visit, on a one-lane desert road. A desert tortoise, an endangered and protected species, was in the road. So we took a few photos to document it, keeping our distance (it was illegal for us to be within 10 feet of this thing, and it was literally our jobs to make sure folks complied with these laws, we were the environmental compliance contractor), and got back in the truck. It started walking towards us, so we backed the truck up–It kept coming. We kept backing up. It kept coming. We were fleeing from a 2 lb turtle for a solid 20 minutes! Absolutely absurd from the outside, but we got kudos for actually following the rules on that one. (If you get close to a desert tortoise they urinate as a defense mechanism. Most of the time they then die of dehydration.)

    1. CommanderBanana*

      Yes, the peeing turtles! If they end up on the parade grounds at Twenty Nine Palms, a group of Marines is dispatched to form a protective square around the turtle and move with it until it wanders out of danger.

    2. Worldwalker*

      Couldn’t you have just stayed in the truck and let the turtle assume it was just a weird big rock, and walk around it?

      1. TimesChange*

        They were following the letter of the law — “it was illegal for us to be within 10 feet of this thing”

      2. James*

        Like TimesChange said, we weren’t allowed to be within 10′ of the turtle, and we were the ones hired to enforce these laws. (For those unfamiliar, environmental law isn’t like traffic law; the police don’t do jack about it unless it’s something like “The lake caught fire”. Mostly companies hire consultants who specialize in environmental compliance to ensure they stay on the right side of the law.) The folks we were working with were construction companies and they had made it clear that they would get away with as much as possible–the BLM nearly shut them down three times because of it–so we were VERY careful about ANY appearance of impropriety.

        There’s also a practical issue. The turtle could have walked around the truck, but it’s more probable that he was looking for shade. It was August and 120 degrees F; we were ALL looking for shade! If one of these guys is under your car when you start it you can scare it, causing it to pee and die of dehydration. So you get to wait until it decides it’s hungry and ambles away from the car. This can take hours. At least once I saw a guy give another guy a ride home because of a tortoise under the car. Since we only had the one truck, and we were a few hours from civilization by car, we didn’t want to risk it. There are some people trained in how to move these tortoises without harming them, but neither of us in the truck was one of them–I’m a paleontologist, and the the other person was an archaeologist, so living things were sort of outside our areas of expertise!

  50. Koalafied*

    It’s a tie between two from the same boss, the ED I reported to as Membership and Marketing Director of a small nonprofit where I was also the de facto office manager handling charitable registrations, office supplies, vendor contracts, and travel arrangements… duties my boss had added after laying off the actual office manager, which then led over time to her adding increasingly more personal assistant type administrative work, including:

    1) designing invitations for her 4 year old’s birthday party

    2) “find out who is in charge of the public parking garage next door and tell them people are smoking cigarettes in it and see if they can do something about that” (note: this garage didn’t have No Smoking signs so she was essentially asking for a new policy rather than better enforcement of existing ones)

  51. Anony*

    I feel like research labs are breeding grounds for this kind of request. When I worked in labs I was asked to: (1) illegally work 40 hours a week while only getting paid for 20 hours (and written up if I didn’t), (2) put my bosses’ kid’s name on my paper when he hadn’t done any of the work and wasn’t even affiliated with any research institution, (3) show up for a 5AM meeting after arriving home from an international, company-required conference on a 2:30 AM flight, and (4) come in to work the day after undergoing emergency surgery for which I had a medical note stating that I would be out the entire week. I was young and stupid enough to do the first three, but I drew a line at coming in when I was so hopped up on pain meds that I would have been a danger to everyone in the lab.

    1. JustaTech*

      At my first lab I was told by my boss that it didn’t matter that the city was shut down for snow and that there were no snow plows, I had to come in to do a harvest. So I put on my snow boots and climbed into my Subaru and somehow made it down all the steep, unplowed hills to do my harvest.

      Was anyone else in that day, including my boss? No. Would it have mattered scientifically if I had waited a day for the snow to melt? Also no.

      Years later that boss said that I should do a 10 hour tissue processing followed by an 8 hour stimulation and stain, followed by two hours on the very finicky instrument, which would require me to be in the lab alone, all night after doing a very physically demanding process all day. Well, alone except for the creepy security guard. “I am not a grad student, you can’t make me do this, and if you try I will call my union.” (It was also a week after the news broke of a grad student at another university who was murdered by a tech working alone late at night.) My boss backed off.

    2. Hex Libris*

      I’m always amazed by the stories that go “Do something illegal or we’ll write you up for refusing!” Yes, please put your illegal demand in writing. (I know, they’d probably write you up for something else, but I prefer the Elmer Fudd version.)

      1. Anony*

        Lol, the first time they took steps to write me up, I actually did point out that what they were documenting was illegal. I was never written up again (but I was expected to keep working unpaid hours).

  52. Fake Old Converse Shoes (not in the US)*

    Some years ago, there was a massive storm in my city, so massive that several areas were flooded and isolated for a couple of days. I arrived very late to the office because the bus had to take several detours and left me ten blocks from the stop. At the end of the day, my boss stopped at my cubicle and told me I should stay there working up to midnight to compensate for the unworked hours. I told him I wouldn’t because that would mean I’d be locked inside the building till the next day (plus and the area was unsafe at night), but I offered to stay for one extra hour for the following week. He answered that it wasn’t his fault I didn’t use the shuttle provided by the company (which didn’t work where I lived) and left.
    I was glad my contract wasn’t renewed two months later.

    1. Mockingjay*

      We had a rare snow and ice storm in our southern state. I, having lived in snowy climes before, asked Supervisor if WFH was authorized when we got the forecast; she assented. So I brought my laptop home prior to the storm and worked cozily and diligently.

      Several days later, it is finally safe to drive (our state has almost no snow removal or deicing equipment so we pretty much had to wait for it to melt) so I return to the office. Supervisor demands to know why I didn’t come into the office. “Because it wasn’t safe to drive?” Then she tells me that she and another employee came in every day. I stared at her, aghast. “You do know that the Governor issued a state of emergency and only essential/authorized personnel were supposed to be on the road.”

      I had to download and send her a copy of the Governor’s order. Note: we were NOT essential personnel.

    2. Run mad; don't faint*

      My spouse’s boss thought Spouse was lying about their car flooding and not being able to get to work after our area of town flooded one evening. You see, a coworker a few blocks away had just a little water in the street and made it to work fine, so we must not have had much either! He was quite rude about it. Then the rain continued and boss’s neighborhood flooded. Spouse never heard another word about making it up.

  53. Jean*

    I used to work as an office manager for an insane, alcoholic, entitled realtor who loved to brag about how “ruthless” she was. Total nightmare. She once told me to go clean her personal home before her out of town guests arrived, and she became enraged when I told her my cleaning rates were much higher than my office manager per-hour rate. That was the only job I ever quit with no notice AND nothing else lined up. Worth it.

  54. fiona the baby hippo*

    didn’t happen to me but I worked at a ~ flashy media company ~ for a few years that would often have celebrities come through for events. My female boss was helping organize a panel for a semi-well-known chef (not top-tier food network talent but definitely recognizable). Afterward, he asked her where the bathroom was and she walked him to the men’s room (kind of tucked out of the way so it made sense for her to escort him most of the way there). She told him the bathroom code. He looked at her and pointedly looked at the keypad, waiting for her to input the code to the bathroom. She just stared at him till he did it himself.

    2. Workerbee*

      Ah, a fond fantasy of loudly calling for (male) assistance since Important Person seems to have lost the use of his hands. “Chefmeister needs help unzipping, too!”

  55. PizzaTwin*

    In high school, I worked as a server for $2.12/hr plus tips. I had already put in my notice, and we had a sewage backup that happened overnight before my last day. It was before opening, so I was literally making $2.12/hr for prep work. Sewage covered the entire bathroom, the toilets, the sinks, floors in both bathrooms, plus the hallway outside.

    My manager thought it was hilarious. She said “I’m so glad bathrooms are your job and not mine,” and told me I had to clean it by myself. I had a mop, food prep gloves, a bottle of spray, and a roll of thin paper towels (think the brown ones you see in industrial dispensers). I asked for help. She said no. I asked to go next door and buy more supplies and better gloves. She said no. I walked out.

    1. SMH*

      Never thought someone else would have a similar story. I knew someone working at a retail shop that had a backed up toilet as in completely blocked by waste. Manager wanted them to wear gloves and clean it out by hand. Friend told her to call a plumber or feel free to handle it herself and walked.

    2. Selina Luna*

      It’s actually illegal in most states to pay tipped waged when an employee is doing untipped work. This basically falls under the 80/20 rule. Your manager was terrible, and not just because she tried to make you do a deeply unsanitary job without proper supplies. Incidentally, if you HAD done the work and then gotten ill as a result, there’s a good chance that she would have had to pay workers comp too.

  56. SheLooksFamiliar*

    My friend’s male boss asked her to use his nail clippers on a couple of skin tags on his lower back. Just lift the shirt, he said, no need to remove or even lower his pants so it was okay to ask this favor. My friends suggested he ask a male colleague to do it instead.

    Her boss decided those skin tags weren’t so annoying after all.

    5. SnappinTerrapin*

      Hmm. The skin tags I’ve removed (from myself, not an employer) bled.

      If she had complied, the results might not have been what the boss anticipated.

  57. Sariel*

    I worked in a small law firm and the managing partners decided it wasn’t working out with one of the other attorneys — which came to a head when it was discovered he was viewing inappropriate content on his work computer. One of them had said something to the guy but it didn’t apparently get through to him — so as the office manager/lead assistant, I was asked to talk to the guy and ask him to please leave. Very awkward and became more so when I had to tell him specifically why he was being let go. And then had to clean out his desk, where I had the lovely experience of discovering a box full of condoms. Really, really awkward . . .

    2. Yep I'm Old*

      This reminded me of a story I heard from a coworker. He told me that there was a programmer that was fired because he spent part of his workday selling porn DVDs on Ebay. This was the early 2000s when Ebay was very popular.

  58. The Bimmer Guy*

    I was the sole web application developer at a franchise car dealership, known for being especially sleazy. As often happens in privately owned businesses that are poorly run, my job morphed to include many out-of-scope duties, such as IT (usually scraping pornography off of the owner’s father’s computer).

    This dealership was a 45-minute drive, on a good day, from my house, as it was in the next city and well south of the metro. And I worked a normal M-F office schedule. So, imagine my surprise when the new-car manager (my acting boss) called and told me the owner needed me to come down to the store and fix something, right away. On a Saturday.

    I asked him what it was, and he just said it was important. My first thought was that the tape-drive server where all of the financial records were stored was acting up, and–again–it would have been clear outside my job duties and I’d have had no idea what I was doing, but I could understand the urgency and panic. I didn’t think I was being fired–and there’d have been no sense in summoning me there for that, since I didn’t have any company equipment–but I figured I might be if I didn’t honor this request. So I got in my car and drove there, then went straight to the executive office, where all of the top managers were stationed.

    The owner of the dealership handed me a cheap smartphone and explained that one of the sales managers (not the one who had called me) was being catfished by someone who pretended to be a woman but was actually a man, and he needed to get some messages off of the phone and onto his computer. I happened to know this manager was married, so unless he had a consensual, open-relationship arrangement with his wife, he was cheating on her. It looked like a burner phone.

    I did it, because I didn’t feel like I had a choice, but I was pissed. Especially when this manager and all the others began standing around and making queer-phobic comments about the situation. I ended up finding a new job not long after. And I recently learned that the owner of the dealership and several other principals were recently indicted for fraudulent loan origination and selling cars out of trust.

    TL;DR: Owner of business asked me to make a 45-minute drive to the office, on my off day and without prior context, so that I could help a manager who was being catfished get messages off of his phone and onto the computer.

    2. Here we go again*

      I think I know of the car dealership, did they get in trouble for having a remote off switch in their cars that they’d shut off for lack of payment and it would shut cars off while driving? Which could cause car accidents in the freeway.

      1. The Bimmer Guy*

        I don’t think so. Despite being a sleazy dealership, they were a new-car franchise, so they didn’t install trackers on the cars. That’s usually the sort of thing you see at buy-here-pay-here (BHPH) lots.

        That said, this dealership catered to low-credit individuals, and made a lot more money selling lightly used cars and trucks at usurious rates of interest than actually selling the new cars for their namesake brands.

        1. Goody*

          Tame compared to a lot of these other stories but still worth sharing. I’m a former legal secretary for a boutique firm in the center of a major city.
          Boss had me babysit his cats on two separate occasions in my own home and a third time in his downtown condo. He had me send out all of the invitations for one kid’s wedding, including typing out all of the addresses into a mail merge from a hand written address book. But the funniest one (now that it’s in the rearview mirror) was when he got arrested for scalping. He was a season ticket holder for all of the local sports teams, and got caught trying to sell his tickets in front of the venue on game day. Got annoyed at me for not being able to find him a legal loophole (research was never part of my job duties and I didn’t have the database accesses that he did), and then when he did find a way to claim that the scalping law only applied in front of a stadium and that the facility didn’t meet the legal definition as written, got upset when the judge threw the case out based solely on the fact that the defendant is an attorney.
          Surprisingly, the guy is still practicing, and just recently joined another firm as “of counsel”. This thread had me looking. Makes me wonder what happened that he severed from the rest of the partners, who are still together from what I see.

  59. Ms. Hagrid Frizzle*

    I was asked to reconsider whether I really needed my service dog because “what if a client is allergic or scared, you’re being short-sighted and unprofessional” . . . I was 1) not the only team member in my role who served our clients and 2) was having multiple panic attacks a week and suffering from stress-related hypervigilance.

  60. Tris Prior*

    I’m a graphic designer. Both of these things happened at the same job while I was under major tight print deadlines:

    My boss told me to design campaign posters for his teen son’s run for the senior class presidency. “And do 4 or 5 different versions for him so he can choose.”

    My grandboss was on vacation, and my boss thought it would be funny to make a life sized cardboard cutout of grandboss and take photos of it around the office. So he told me to take care of that.

    When I pled printer deadlines for, you know, my actual work, he said “this needs to be your priority right now. So I did both of those things.

    Different job, the company owner was on the road, called the office demanding to speak to his second in command immediately, and when I explained he was currently in the men’s room, demanded that I go in the men’s room and retrieve him (I’m a woman). I declined, got cursed out, quit the next day.

  61. Felicity Flowers*

    When I was a teenager my boss would ask some employees to do work around her house and pay us in cash. Around the holidays she’d always hire a couple of us to either help decorate or help pack-up the holiday decorations. My 2nd year helping to pack-up the decorations and move them to the attic she gave me her Husbands old underwear to wrap the fragile items in instead of idk…bubble wrap tissue paper… newspaper.

  62. middle name danger*

    When I worked at a watch kiosk in a mall, my then-manager called me at 3am to open the next day because he was in jail from a DUI. He then fired me shortly after because “it didn’t seem like I wanted to be there” in order to hire a friend who would give him rides since he no longer had a driver’s licence.

    1. Jean*

      “It seems like you don’t want to be here” is my favorite out-of-touch boss saying. I DON’T. THAT’S WHY YOU HAVE TO GIVE ME MONEY TO COME HERE.

    2. Observer*

      “it didn’t seem like I wanted to be there”

      I’m assuming he was right about that. Why WOULD you want to be there?!

      1. Middle Name Danger*

        The best part is, I’d already given (long) notice because I was leaving for an internship. He just cut me loose early!

    3. You get a pen and you get a pen*

      In high school, I had a boss that would have one of us from the small store he ran drive us around on Saturday mornings so he could find where he left his car from the prior night’s bender

  63. an IT worker*

    President of the company made me fly to Chicago from Philadelphia to replace the USB cable on his palm pilot that wouldn’t sync.
    The purchased ticket was 1 way so I wouldn’t be able to leave until he was convinced it was working.
    I flew into Midway, grabbed a cable on the way, had him syncing again within 5 minutes of arrival at the office. Twiddled my thumbs while the office manager booked me a flight home. Also, this was not long after 9/11 so I got searched both directions since I was on 1-way tickets.

  64. CBB*

    Some would consider this pedestrian, but the most unreasonable thing I’ve had to do early in my career was share hotel rooms with a coworkers on business trips.

    When I was in college, sharing a dorm room was no big deal, but a few years later when I was a married adult with my own house and a real job, it made me really uncomfortable.

      1. talos*

        Been there. Done that. Our student organization was *not allowed* to book fewer than 4 people per hotel room.

      2. Aarti*

        Yes i never want to do this again. It’s not ok to ask me to share a hotel room with anyone. Nowadays I’d rather pay the difference myself. F your team building, I need my time alone, even if it is only an hour.

        1. Artemesia*

          as an academic we got very little financial support for conferences and yet presenting papers is critical to professional advancement and tenure — for the first half of my career (we also were not paid well) I usually shared a room with at least one other person. As a grad student, there could be 6 in a room. At least in my day, we were not expected to bunk with men. My daughter was expected to share rooms with male colleagues on business trips.

          1. Mazey's Mom*

            I work in academia as well and was surprised to hear about this from faculty. I do grant budgets and I *always* budget separate hotel rooms for both faculty and students when travel is involved. Sharing a car is one thing, but no way on rooms! There are other ways to save money.

    2. Yay, I’m a Llama Again!*

      This is one of the things that has really surprised me reading this site, the number of jobs where it seems to be expected that you share hotel rooms with colleagues. I don’t share hotel rooms with friends! I would find it very unreasonable if I was asked to share. (I’m UK).

      1. CBB*

        I worked for two companies (in the US) where it was expected.

        The first one changed it’s policy after an employee got food poisoning and she and her roommate had to endure what must have been an awkward/embarrassing night on opposite sides of the bathroom door.

        The second company not only made us share rooms, but for trade shows made a group of 5 employs stay in a 3-bedroom AirB&B.

        That company had been founded by a pair of married couples, and for many years the company consisted of them and a few of their friends. By the time I was hired it had grown to 25 employees, yet they never seemed to realize that they were not longer a group of buddies.

      2. LDN Layabout*

        Culturally it makes more sense when you consider that sharing rooms at uni is normal and then it morphs into being a lower level employee thing/cost saving for non-profits.

        Whereas in the UK it’s really Not A Thing Ever, except a very few exceptions at university (mostly if you ended up at a uni with historical accommodation some bigger rooms were sold as being sharing ones).

        1. LDN Layabout*

          Also country size, actually, at least for trips within the UK. There’s very few journeys where someone can’t do train there and back, unless it’s a full-full day of meetings.

      3. Naked&Unafraid*

        First job after university, in a policy / research role, I was asked to join the more extrovert comms folk representing our organisation at a big trade conference & exhibition, involving an overnight stay. I was assigned a twin room with a female colleague about my age. As I’m unpacking, she says “Just so you know, I sleep naked and hope you are OK with that”. I was dumbstruck, and just kept my eyes firmly fixed on my bedtime reading as she wandered around in the nude. I’m sure it might seem titillating to some but for me it was just awfully awkward.

    3. anonymous73*

      I had to do that once and I was pissed about it. If it was a suite, with separate bedrooms/bathrooms and only a shared common space, I would mind a little less. But we had to share a basic hotel room. She was a friend, but I need my alone time, and she also liked to go to bed at 9:30.

      1. Raine*

        Had to share a room with a coworker for a continuing medical education conference we were hosting. Turned out she had a CPAP, snored even with the CPAP, and liked to fall asleep with the TV on. Hated every minute and didn’t get much rest at all that trip.

    4. Dream Jobbed*

      Be glad your not a librarian. Sharing rooms, and on occasion beds, at conferences is the norm. We are so happy to have any travel funds that we do it willingly. :(

    5. Shiba Dad*

      Many years ago I shared a hotel room with a coworker for three straight weeks. We were attending training classes.

  65. Yep*

    When I was a server in college (15 years ago), my boss asked me to let his 70+ year old male family member kiss me on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t want to piss off my boss and didn’t say no. I look back on that with sadness and horror.

    1. Artemesia*

      As a woman in my 70s with a husband also in his 70s WTF. People do not become needy creepy doofuses with age. Ick. I bet his father was a creep at 35 too.

  66. No Longer Gig-less Data Analyst*

    Back in the day when I worked in Yellow Pages, it was very common to create these huge media plans for our clients, fully knowing that about 60% of them would be downsized or cancelled just prior to the publisher’s due date. Because of system limitations at the time we had to enter them as if they were real, as in, the value of the ads showed up in our revenue reporting. What was normal at other agencies I had worked for though, was to put some internal notes in so you could strip the unapproved ad revenue out before presenting the data to what would now be called stakeholders.

    At my last job in that industry, I was instructed by the President of our division to just lump everything together so it looked like we were making a lot more money than we were. I was aghast and eventually left because of that and other dishonest practices. The house of cards came tumbling down about 6 months later, when the good old boy CEO who was buddies with the president retired and was replaced with a sharp new one. She took one look at the books and knew they were cooked as hell. The president and his hand picked vice-president were let go immediately, and within another 6 months they laid more than half the staff because the income wasn’t really there to afford so many people generating so little money.

    2. lailaaaaah*

      Yeah, this was similar to why I lost my first office job- I was on a three-person team, and each of us did sales to a slightly different market. Me + coworker were just plodding along, doing our jobs quietly, when one Friday our boss dragged me into a meeting room and berated me into handing in my notice.

      When I came in on the following Monday, he was gone, and we never saw him again- apparently he’d been reducing the amount of revenue shown on our P&L sheet and pocketing the difference, and he’d been hoping to somehow pin it on me, despite the fact that I had no access to the sheet. It was wild, and I was so glad to be out of there.

  67. Oryx*

    Not as unreasonable as some of the others, but my manager from several jobs ago once asked me to falsify internal documentation because the person in the position before me had been lapse in recording information. It wasn’t even anything major — this was a library, and if I remember it was related to checkouts or ILL requests or something equally tame — but I didn’t HAVE the information and somehow my manager wanted me to just magically create it from thin air. Which I wouldn’t do. He then tried to backpedal and say that’s not what he meant, although he could never fully explain how he expected me to fill out a document with specific data points that were just nonexistent.

    Oh, at another job I was asked to decorate pumpkins (with paint) for the grandchildren of the admin assistant to the CEO. That I did to because it was a slow day and something fun.

    1. Cremedelagremlin*

      Oh my gosh, this reminds me of a copywriting job I had where the boss (not a writer) *forbade us from asking new clients any questions about their goals, audience or business (information which he also refused to provide). He expected that I would be able to write copy for entire websites with only a company name and industry to go on. That’s…not how it works.

      1. Hex Libris*

        On the contrary! It’s super easy because that’s only enough information to write the most generic imaginable copy. Or maybe just one set of copy and swap out the company name. Think of the labor savings from not actually providing the service!

  68. Monte*

    I am a veterinarian and worked for Dr. Malpractice. He asked me to falsify USDA health inspection certificates for some scheme involving transporting racehorses between states to avoid taxes. I was to meet up with the guy some time between 1 and 4 am and just sign off that I examined and took temperatures on a truckload of horses I had never set eyes on so this rando could avoid paying out a few bucks to Uncle Sam. To be clear if caught I could end up with a $10k fine and lose my USDA certification leaving me completely unable to do my job. I declined and he sent his admin to forge his signature instead.
    I finally left after two years, a giant pile of illegal behavior and having a board complaint because of his incompetence (it was dismissed, thankfully). I was so desperate for a job I didn’t leave after he broke my phone and threw my keys into a wall during a tantrum.

    1. Black Horse Dancing*

      OMG. And veterinarians are wanted everywhere today! If you are practicing, we have many spots in New Mexico for vets!

      1. Monte*

        I got the hell out of private practice after years of toxicity. I work in adjacent field now. Unfortunately this happened during the recession and decent vet jobs were really hard to find.

    2. Artemesia*

      forgery is a career ender and yet sometimes very junior people take that risk. My husband was in charge of securities regulation for a state and got to a legal meeting with someone attempting to launch a security that did not meet legal requirements. When he told them that, they smirked and told him his office had approved it. He asked for the signed documentation and then handed it to his employee who had ‘signed off’ and who said ‘not my signature.’ That employee was a ‘trained signer’ who had actually had training on perfectly executing legal signatures. And then everyone turned and looked at the very junior lawyer on their side who saw her career ending. She knew she couldn’t get the offering approved and so took the risk it could slide through.

      1. Biziki*

        I’m so curious about this ‘trained signer’ thing but the only results google shows me is in relation to some kind of TSA badge process. Please tell me more about this? Who trains these trained signers? What does the training consist of? Can an ordinary person off the street get this training? It sounds like some kind of hollywood thriller concept.

        1. Edwina*

          I’m assuming it’s something like a notary public? With a specific kind of signature and maybe a stamp of some sort?

  69. Can't say*

    Boss’s wife called me to tell me to keep tabs on boss’s emails/phone calls to make sure he wasn’t cheating (again) with an employee who sued him for wrongful termination.

  70. Another health care worker*

    Before my current career, I was a paralegal in “Biglaw.” The partner I worked for emailed me saying he was going to pitch to Large Co. You Know as a potential client, and asked me to do a bunch of research, specifically including the salaries of their C-suite.

    He told me later he was interviewing to be their General Counsel, and they were never a prospective client. He didn’t even realize that I would connect the dots to see he was stealing my time and our employer’s money to use me as his personal assistant to prepare for his interview/salary negotiation.

    He didn’t get the job, went to work somewhere less prestigious, was also sexually harassing me (and was the person I was expected to report harassment to), and presumably still sucks wherever he is.

    1. I Am Not An Engineer*

      and presumably still sucks wherever he is.”

      .

      The tagline that could, and should, follow all these guys around forever. Like a banner attached to a plane. “Still sucks.”

  71. Less Bread More Taxes*

    This happened at my current job, about a year ago. For context, I work in a building that has multiple small office rooms with four desks each. Since I’ve been here, there’s been maximum of two people in each room, so it’s quite spacious and we all like it that way (or so I thought). In terms of the gender breakdown, there are more men than women, but it’s not too bad. I think there have always been about there times more men than women.

    Anyway, I was sharing a room with a male colleague that I got on quite well with. One of my direct bosses asked me if I would move rooms. I’d already been there nearly a year, I had a desk right by the window, and I liked my office mate, so I didn’t want to move. I was then told that they were making a “girls” room where they would shove all four women in one office while leaving most of the men to get a whole office for themselves. I’m not sure how this came about (maybe one of the guys was a creep to one of my female coworkers?), but they seemed to think that all the women in the office were uncomfortable having to share offices with the men and this was their solution.

    I was baffled to say the least. I don’t even think I responded properly in whole sentences. For the rest of the week, multiple managers requested that I moved. I directly asked my office mate if *I* was making *him* uncomfortable, and he assured me that that wasn’t the case, so I stuck to my guns, and they let it go eventually. The other three women at the time did end up moving to their own room, and I stayed where I was. I never found out what prompted that.

    And yes, this was in a developed, otherwise progressive country where men and women have been working together like adults for decades.

    1. Artemesia*

      It did not occur to them to put 4 guys in offices so each women could be secure in knowing they didn’t need to share an office?

      1. Your Local Password Resetter*

        And inconvenience the menfolk? And possibly themselves!?
        Obviously that would be inconceivable!

        1. Artemesia*

          A good spot for the Nashville football stadium story. When the new one was built they attempted ‘potty parity’ i.e. enough restrooms for women so there were not long lines. They misjudged and the first game the beer filled men had to wait in line as they didn’t have enough men’s restrooms. This was a CRISIS. This was a DISASTER. This got fixed before the next game as they repurposed ladies rooms to mens rooms. Women had been standing in line for decades, perhaps centuries — but one game and it got fixed for men.

    2. Charlotte Lucas*

      I don’t understand the math here. If 2 women wanted to be in one office, they could put 2 men in another. And if one woman is unhappy with her officemate, why do the other women have to move?

      1. Less Bread More Taxes*

        Neither do I. I put my money on the fact that some guy was uncomfortable with the women (possibly a manager) and wanted to just move them all to one corner of the building so no one would have to see them. Otherwise as you say, it makes no sense.

  72. The Rural Juror*

    How timely! This was just last week –

    Fortunately, I’ve just accepted another job offer and I’m starting to work out my 2 weeks notice. The small construction company I currently work for had a client relationship that was not going well. Although I understand why it made sense for us to part ways with this client, I don’t completely agree with the way it was handled on either side. My boss has been a little paranoid about things since we started the formal process of severing ties. He thought the client was going to try to poach employees from his company to continue the work. Lawyers were involved and a settlement was reached a couple of weeks ago, so we pulled out of the half-completed project.

    Last week, on Friday afternoon, my boss asked me to do a “drive by” through the construction site to see if they had resumed work there. If anyone from the client’s team was on site, they would most definitely recognize my vehicle and know it was me doing a reconnaissance mission. I told him as much, but his reply was basically that he’d rather them recognize me than see him driving through. I told him I couldn’t go that afternoon because I had an errand to run after work and this “mission” would take me in the opposite direction. He seemed disappointed, but told me it could wait until Monday. Monday came around and, luckily, he got derailed by something else and forgot about it. I’ll feel more comfortable saying no if he asks again, but I doubt he will since I’ve already given notice.

    1. BeenThere*

      This sounds like my strategy for unreasonable requests, make it so it’s impossible for me to do right away. Leave it to the boss to remember what was so important to pull me off my current work. Note: I’m a software engineer and we are often (rightly or wrongly) measured in part by how much code we commit. The types of task my boss tend to give me how not measurable outcome that I can point to later when we don’t get the code we scheduled for the week completed.

  73. I’m not HR*

    The most unreasonable thing was being asked to forge the signature of an HR person on immigration documents that she had forgotten to complete before going on vacation. (I said no.)

    1. Kathryn*

      Once at a small, family-owned business, the owner was going to be on vacation on payday. She personally did the payroll, and printed & signed each of our paychecks. (There were less than 10 of us, including the owner.) She asked her brother’s wife (brother was an employee, his wife was not) to come in, do the payroll, and sign her, the owner’s, name on the paychecks. And brother’s wife did so.

      I took the check straight to owner’s bank, told them the signature was not owner’s, but someone else’s and that owner was on actually vacation and then I asked them what I should do. After a few minutes of discussion in the back room, they said they would cash the check.

      I promptly deposited the cash at my own bank across town and started a new job about a month later.

      1. JB*

        What a fascinating response on your end.

        As someone who works in banking, although we would DISCOURAGE this (mostly because it opens up some liability for the borrower – our ability to verify signatures is only as good as the signatures on file, so intentionally muddying the waters with fake signatures is a bad idea) we would definitely accept the check if we were able to reach the account holder and confirm that it was alright. I’ve had account holders straight-up tell me ‘this is so and so, she signs my checks for me. She may sometimes sign them in front of you.’ It’s part of doing business with small companies.

        Personally, I would have done the same as you just to be sure the paycheck wasn’t going to bounce, but I wouldn’t have quit over it.

        1. Napkin Thief*

          And funny enough, having worked in banking in a HIGH fraud activity region, I had the opposite reaction – this really would suck, and I would be careful to make it clear it’s no fault of the employee’s at all, but we would definitely not cash it. Unfortunately we had too many cases of takeover fraud where it wasn’t really the owner on the other end of the line.

          The only exception I could think of is if the owner was someone extremely well known to us – like we all know by face and voice – but even then we would probably only accept it for deposit unless we ALSO knew the customer well and/or could find in the system prior checks for them that cleared without an issue. AND the owner would get an earful for not adding another signer on their payroll account/otherwise planning ahead for these types of situations, and a note would be placed on the account to never do that again.

    2. Artemesia*

      I’ve had to sign for people out of the country back before it was easy to do that on line. I ALWAYS sign with my sig or initials next to the signature with explanatory phrase. Did that whether asked to do that or not, if I was expected to act on behalf of anyone like this.

      1. JagoMouse*

        I once had an in-house Lawyer ask me to put my bosses’ signature on a legal document, while he was on a plane (pre-COVID). I had his e-Sig, as his EA, and we had a very strict and agreed policy between the two of us, that it was never to go on something without his express permission. He’d been burned before, this was a big thing for him, especially as the CFO for a listed company, and I’d never break his trust on this, especially on a legal document where he’s responsible for it later.

        So I stand my ground with this lawyer and say No, I can’t do that without him reading the document and then specifically asking me to put the e-Sig on the document. She pushes. I offer to call him when he gets off the flight in a few hours and talk it through. She pushes, it’s very urgent, has to be done now. I suggest she finds someone else who can sign it. She pushes, come on, not that big a deal, he knows about it.

        I give her a hard no, got mildly abused for it because the document was very urgent and then she goes and finds someone else to sign it (big surprise). I had to have an awkward conversation with our Legal Counsel and advise that it’s kind of sketchy for one of his lawyers to ask me to fraudulently sign a document – and then he tried to gaslight me by saying that she wasn’t asking me to do that (yes…yes she was).

        I told my boss when he got off the plane. He had my back, appreciated the way I’d handled it. Lawyer didn’t last much longer, and never spoke to me again. I’m still shocked she thought it was OK. Clearly they didn’t cover fraud in her legal classes…

  74. TypityTypeType*

    Years ago I worked for a tiny business where they used to periodically purchase mailing lists. The boss’s boyfriend tried to persuade me to add the lists to our own database — which is to say, to steal the info and reuse it without paying.

    I finally called the mailing list supplier and asked how they’d know if a list was used more than once — I was probably indiscreet enough in those days to explain exactly why I asking — and they said each list included a certain number of dummy addresses that would bounce back to them, so they’d know how many times the list was used and by whom.

    I have no idea if that was true, it now occurs to me. But it was enough to get the boyfriend to back off. I could not STAND that guy. (She married him.)

    1. Nanani*

      Wouldn’t that also run into regulations and laws around unsubscribing?
      Reusing lists that haven’t been updated with unsubscribe information sounds like a great way to get your whole business blocked en masse.

      1. Kelly White*

        If it’s for an actual physical mailing (as opposed to email) there isn’t an unsubscribe regulation. But, as a person who uses purchased mailing lists, I can confirm, yes, they have addresses in them to alert the company to fraud.

      2. Cranky lady*

        Showing my age, I assumed these were postal mail (not email) addresses as I know those mailing lists did that. Presumably email ones do too. It’s hard to stop getting postal junk mail in the U.S. (I know I’ve tried)

        1. David*

          In case you haven’t tried these already (or for any other readers who don’t know), the FTC has a page called “How To Stop Junk Mail” (https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-stop-junk-mail) which links to a couple of industry websites where you can opt out of various kinds of postal junk mail. I used them both and they have been remarkably effective for me; I went from averaging multiple pieces of junk mail per day to less than one a week.

          1. Ally McBeal*

            omg THANK YOU for this! I had no idea this existed, although given the effectiveness of the Do Not Call registry, I’m only hopeful it will stop SOME of the unwanted offers.

    2. AnonyNon*

      I had a similar situation! Except these lists were taken from governmant licensure lists, and you had to sign a contract saying that you wouldn’t resell them. Whelp, guess what my company wanted to do?
      They tried to make the receptionist sign the contracts, but he was a smart cookie are refused. He took it back to the director, who didn’t want her name on it either, and eventually it was swept under the rug.

    3. Artemesia*

      early in my career when doing some recruitment for a program I used a directory of a professional organization — it did have dummy addresses and they came back and asked us for payment for use of their list. I was naive and new and didn’t know that using such a list was not legitimate — but they definitely did have their list protected in that way.

  75. mean green mother*

    I got hired at the director-level of a small nonprofit. The program I was in charge of was supposed to work with low-income childcare centers in my region and convince them to improve the quality of the nutrition they were offering their students. If you don’t know the childcare industry, that’s an uphill battle. Most small centers are barely making ends meet and serving whatever snack/lunch is the most affordable and their kids will eat. Six months into the job, my boss (the ED) sprang it on me that my program was supposed to be the revenue-generating arm of the nonprofit AND I was responsible for bringing in enough revenue to cover my own salary!!! No one had mentioned any of that before! They expected child care centers to pay me thousands of dollars to teach them how to feed their students healthier meals. It was…not feasible. I spent the next few months investigating if there was a way to make it work, and then a few more months trying to convince the ED and the Board that it could not work. Once they told me they expected me to pivot the entire program to selling menus to wealthy child care centers (who likely had the lowest need), I resigned. I was a nutrition policy professional, btw, with no experience in sales.

  76. Batcat71*

    Once. My supervisor at a warehouse had her own bathroom with products supplied by the building. She had us run to get her softer toilet paper.
    Another time the phone lines in a few cities were down, a senior worker asked if I the receptionist had any “special way” to call said cities, as the phone lines were down
    Another time I was asked to do something about the local hawks, birds of prey, could be made to stop killing birds near the work buildings as it was not nice to see dismembered birds.
    Another time.. while at the desk of a 500 person office, with a crazy busy switch board, to run flush a toilet for someone. For real. I had to find someone to do that
    Same huge office. Big meeting. Three floors. 9 boardrooms over said 3 floors, to not only turn the lights on, (because one morning in a dark boardroom before work someone used the room for a private call and didn’t turn lights on, tripped and blamed me) but to have the blinds at a certain level and tilt, stick fridges and turn cans outside facing so people didn’t have to “guess” what each pop was. Unload two dishwashers and bring everyone’s personal mug to them, or make sure no one else used them, place knives firmly with blade down AND be responsible when someone moved them non sharp edge down, be written up Cus someone “could” have cut themselves after someone else moves them.
    What else? Oh yes
    My office manager of same large office needed me to keep his affairs private from his wife as he was a “hard working man” and he was sure I understood he needed his “time” and arrange cabs for said women on the company’s dime
    I could go on.

    1. Batcat71*

      Oh. I had 15 minutes each morning for all opening duties. I just worked on my own time every day for almost 5 years to get it all done

      1. Rainy*

        Not work related, but the one and only time my in-laws visited us, my MIL became enraged that you have to jiggle the handle on our upstairs toilet and stopped flushing after herself.

    3. Rainy*

      When I was a student worker in my undergrad department office, I once had to go down two flights of stairs to push the “send” button on an email for an emeritus.

      While I was walking down the stairs ahead of him, he made rude comments about my tattoos. Frankly, if I were unable to find the “send” button in my email I wouldn’t talk shit about anyone else’s “unprofessionalism”.

  77. Loosey Goosey*

    This is not TERRIBLE, but was typical of the work-life boundary-blurring that was common at a tiny nonprofit I worked at: We were making a video as part of a public awareness campaign, and my boss asked me to volunteer my apartment as a location for filming. Thankfully, my apartment ended up being too small for all the recording equipment, so we switched to my boss’s home. (I did, however, bring some of my own clothes for the actors to wear.) The crew and actors took over her house and used her personal belongings as props. She was so overwhelmed by the intrusion that she cried at the end of the day. The whole thing was awful, and I left the organization shortly after, so I don’t know if they ever even used the video.

    1. lilsheba*

      She was overwhelmed, and at first expected YOU to put up with an invasion of your home and privacy? Glad that didn’t happen.

  78. Esmae*

    One of my first jobs was as an assistant to a local low-budget filmmaker. I started out doing scheduling, typing things up, contacting actors about scheduling, driving people to locations, that kind of thing. Eight months later, I was doing the boss’s laundry at my parents’ house because he didn’t have a washing machine. I actually did it a few times before I realized it was welllll past time to get out.

  79. Lady Meyneth*

    I was going to be a speaker in a high profile conference abroad, and my company also had a booth there. The office manager (OM) had forgotten to send materials for the booth (pamphlets, trinkets, little things like that) so I was asked to bring a box of those with my luggage. No big so far, mistakes happen and the OM was only with us for 3 months. He gave off some sexist vibes but nothing over that top yet, and newbies got a lot of leeway.

    So the day before I traveled, he presented me with a humongous box, over both weight and dimension limits. When I asked how those fees would be handled, he told me it’s “just like a girl to want a man to pay for her bags”, that it’s my responsibility to pack my luggage and to figure it out. And that since I was going to the airport from home early the next day, I was on my own to take that box home (“you need to pay for your own taxi if you want one, little lady, you’re in the real world now”).

    I left without the box. The company didn’t have a booth in the conference. When the CEO later asked us what happened, OM told the full truth about everything he said, how he was terribly wronged by my behavior, and demanded the CEO put me in my place. An exact quote was “you need to stop letting her play at a man’s job, everyone knows what she’s really here for”.

    He was fired so fast I almost got whiplash. And CEO seemed really sorry he couldn’t kill him instead.

    5. SeluciaMD*

      *BLINKS*

      Please pardon me while I go excavating under my home to see if I can find the lower half of my jaw.

  80. Teaching in Rain Boots*

    I used to work at a school. We were experiencing an extended period of heavy rain, which caused the basement level of the school to back up with 2-3 inches of raw sewage for about 3 days. The entire basement floor was covered with poop water. The kicker is that this floor is where all of the teacher and administrative offices/desks and SPED classrooms were located, so there was no option to close it off entirely and continue to hold school in a safe part of the building. Rather than canceling school (hello, OSHA violations!), the principal said to “wear rain boots.” For 3 days. Of poop.

    Oh, btw, this principal is now in jail for committing millions of dollars of fraud against the state by misrepresenting enrollment and attendance numbers.

  81. Mentitude*

    Ooh this is a good one!

    – Plan the World Cup of Segway Polo (no, not in the job description; we were a development nonprofit and the boss’s side job was as a Segway distributor)
    – Fly to a hot zone country for a month with no return ticket purchased (Yes, but only after getting me a return ticket)
    – Manage the boss’s communications with their son (NO)
    – Pay the boss’s parking tickets *with my own money* (NO)

    This all for the same boss, who also paid in cash often weeks late and was later missing/captured in a non-friendly nation for a while. I still avoid the part of town where that office was.

  82. Anastasia Beaverhousen*

    I worked in a SNF (skilled nursing facility) and the administrator was a true Nurse Ratchet. Zero empathy, likely had a personality disorder. We were in the height of COVID and were having an outbreak in our facility. She made me and one other staff move several patients the smaller short term rehab unit as part of a isolation protocol, and then when she realized this was impacting funds due to the lack of rehab patients she made us move them to a long term unit where other patients lived. Back and forth, several times, it takes days to move and clean the rooms, and test all of the patients for COVID using a nasal swab. Then she bitched at us (and laid the entire unit staff off) because other tasks on the unit were falling behind as we were short staffed (they had problem retaining nurses before the recent news attention on the great exodus from healthcare). I understand why our healthcare system is in the shape it is in. There is a special place in hell for this woman.

  83. PromotionalKittenBasket*

    When I worked at a nonprofit, the Dev department director was a crocheter who wanted to learn to knit. So I wrote her a pattern, and fixed her mistakes, and on my last day, she had me finish the project. One of the goofy things that happens in such a place, I suppose

  84. Kat Em*

    As a licensed MASSAGE therapist, was asked to supervise physical therapy sessions for a patient because the PT Assistant was running late.

    Sure, let me just go to school for two years, do an internship, take an exam, get licensed, and I’ll be right back in time to cover her shift!

    1. Introverted Type-A Employee*

      As the former Practice Manager of a large outpatient physical therapy clinic, this gives me stress hives! :O

  85. Anoncharvist*

    I work in an archive. Any time we replace a box, there is a 3-person, half-dozen step process to prepare old boxes for the trash. Multiple people have to inspect each box, and physically sign an affidavit that the box is empty. Each office has an empty box disposal coordinator. We receive biannual box disposal training, with a fully illustrated SOP and slide presentation.
    All of this is done by order of one of our higher ups, based on a single misunderstanding 8 years ago.

    1. GoryDetails*

      That’s actually pretty fascinating! I can imagine a single valuable piece of paper sliding under the bottom flap of a box and getting lost. Though it does seem that the preventative steps are a bit extreme!

      1. Rainy*

        Well now you need to hire and train the cat, add the cat to payroll, give the cat a supervisor, arrange for the cat’s commute, provide a teeny tiny cat-sized desk and laptop…

        It’s me, I want to the be the cat’s supervisor.

      2. Worldwalker*

        No need to insert the cat. Just set the box on the floor, and the cat will self-insert.

        However, that does not guarantee emptiness. One of my cats will insert himself into boxes full of all kinds of things, including my other cat, who doesn’t like him.

  86. Typing All The Time*

    Our newspaper publisher was on the board of his town’s arts center, which we heavily promoted. Each summer, the center had a gala that needed volunteers to set up tables and chairs. He requested that our staff did it. The higher ups did but as time went along, people scheduled other work to do.

  87. TheExchequer*

    A former boss tried to demand I give him $700 on my last day (for a business related error that, to be fair, I did make). You’ll be pleased to know that I gave a very polite, professional version of telling him to pound sand.

    1. Raine*

      The number of people I’ve met who think that any amount of money from a coworker or subordinate is reasonable to demand is both astonishing and frustrating, because it tells me they come from a world of never having to worry about a paycheck.

  88. Essentially Cheesy*

    My previous retired boss provided a lot of fodder for this sort of thing.

    Each of his three sons got married during my time with him. He had me typing a ridiculous amount of wedding invitations and mailing labels for each wedding. For a while I literally felt like I was part of his extended family, and not willingly.

    He also was heavily involved with leadership and in developing a local Hindu temple. I also did an obscene amount of typing and presentations for projects associated with that. I often felt very harassed on a personal/religious level but complied as I kept on thinking his time would be short (ha he was like the Energizer Bunny but is finally retired).

    He finally backed off when word got to HR/Plant Management that he was having me do all of these extra duties (it ended up being a LOT). The last thing he asked me to do was laminate a picture of a Hindu god statue, which I’m pretty sure was a fertility god because it looked like it had an erection. I knew his time was coming to an end so I shook it off.

    I could even handle helping him out with these things if he was nice but he really wasn’t – he was such a toxic narcissistic person to me (and to everyone else in our office/plant). He would be upset and in a panic every day about something.

    It’s been 10 months and I’m only starting to heal.

  89. MerelyMe*

    The last straw at the job I quit to go to grad school was when my boss rolled up his sleeve and said “This is what the rash looks like, if the doctor calls.”

    1. lilsheba*

      Reminds me of when an ex boyfriend’s step mother came in, holding up her shirt, and asked him if something looked infected. I about died.

  90. DutchBlitz*

    I worked as an Adoptions Counselor at a local county animal shelter (open admission). At the time, we were not at no-kill status, but working hard to get there. The adoptions team was in charge of getting to know the dogs and advocating for them to adopters and rescue orgs. My boss at the time was leaving early for the day, and it was looking like we were going to run out of space. As she left, she told the entire adoptions team that if we did not get enough dogs out, we would have to help euthanize them. Her henchman enforced that command later that afternoon. The counselors were forced to line up in the hall with the dogs and called into the e-room one by one. (Side note, we had a very robust medical team. When euth was required they ALWAYS had 2 people in the room: 1 to administer the sedative and 1 to comfort/cuddle the animal. This particular cruelty was forcing the counselors, who had spent weeks getting to know the animal to be an unwilling participant, and to put the blame on them.)

    I refused. (I had more job prospects than my colleagues, and was not worried about getting fired.) I told the director what was happening and left for the day. I quit later that month and moved over to the foster department, and we made no-kill status a couple years later. Unfortunately said supervisor still has her position. (I work in finance now.)

    3. Industrial Tea Machine*

      Sweet heavens, that’s literally bringing tears to my eyes. I am so sorry. BRB, going to cuddle my rescue dog now.

      1. DutchBlitz*

        It was pretty tragic! The good news is that while that incident didn’t inspire sweeping change like I would have hoped, there was a lot of smaller changes that added up to one of the largest open-intake shelters in the Southeast becoming successfully no-kill. They no longer euth for space! (And that supervisor was obvi the anomaly. Most shelter employees have hearts of gold!)

        1. VegetarianRaccoon*

          Wait, you didn’t work for CAS, did you? Just being nosy since I worked for Dr. W before it went under. Feel free to ignore if it’s too personal.

      2. SeluciaMD*

        SAME. How lacking in human feeling do you have to be to decide that’s a reasonable thing to do???

        Thank goodness my little Lu is nearby for a good belly rub and some therapeutic cuddling. GOOD LORD.

  91. Campfire Raccoon*

    Before my father went into long-term care he was falling regularly, particularly behind the toilet. The fire department knew him and my stepmother well. After a particularly bad fall I had to take a day off to help my stepmother. When I went back to work the next day my boss accused me of lying about why I took the day off and ordered me to hire a full-time live-in nurse. At my crap-ace salary. I quit.

    My husband owns his own business. He had one client ask my husband to have sex with his wife (while the client watched) after he finished completing the installation. He did not. Still got paid though.

  92. Catalin*

    Oh, it’s a tie between
    1) do not leave the desk for any reason if the other EA wasn’t there (the boss could NOT be bothered by answering his own phone) (ANY REASON, y’all. No restroom, no water, nada.)
    2) it was a hospital system transferring all the paper records to e-health records, which involved mega scanners. Well, I was told to clean the stone rollers inside the mega scanners with a flat screwdriver. Scraping the accumulated ink transfer off, while it was still inside the machine. I ended up contortioned backwards to get half into the machine so I could scrape the residue off the roller.
    If I’d had any social know-how, I’d have seen the signs that they were trying to get rid of me…but I just kept jumping through their hoops because it was my first real job and I didn’t know better. Oh, if I could time travel…

  93. Anon at this time*

    I was once asked to essentially write language into a consent form allowing us to show up at a research participant’s house unannounced without making it sound like we were just …. showing up to their house when they passively stopped wanting to participate.

    Luckily, I did such a good job at writing that, my boss became uncomfortable with it and went back on their suggestion. (Which is great, because I would have been the one responsible for the showing up at stranger’s houses and I was NOT about to do that).

  94. Rainy Day*

    I used to work in a post office in a convenient shop (for other UK readers, it was a Spar), and we had a Christmas party. The party venue was about 5 miles from my home at that point, and about 15 from the workplace.
    One of the shop supervisors and a colleague asked if I could pick them up for the party, and then take them home again. They both lived near the Spar shop, and the party was happening on a day I was off. I would be doing *60 miles* if I went to collect them, drove back to the party, took them home THEN went back home myself.

    I said I would do this- on the condition that they paid me petrol money for this. Apparently this made me rude, entitled and unreasonable, but I stood my ground. That’s a lot of mileage to do for free! They weren’t happy at having to get a taxi, but I bet the taxi cost the same as the petrol money would’ve.

    1. PollyQ*

      The taxi almost certainly would’ve cost more, since the fare needs to cover the cost of gas, maintenance, insurance, and the driver’s pay. Also, I know gas is more expensive in the UK than the US, but if your car gets 20mpg and gas costs $5/gal, then that’s only $15, which the two people could’ve split. Ridiculous of them to walk away (heh) from such a bargain.

  95. maj381*

    My first job out of college was the receptionist/admin assistant for a small accounting firm – one day my boss asked me to fill out some forms that her kids’ school needed so they could start kindergarten. She was just like “oh yeah fill them in as best you can and then I’ll do the rest” and I must have given them back to her still 95% blank (I knew their home address and her and her husband’s contact info, and that was about it). I didn’t even know her kids’ names before she handed me those forms, how did she expect me to answer questions about their food allergies and reading skills? It was a very strange use of my time.

    1. Ally McBeal*

      I’ve had to do similar tasks – sometimes I think they just need help, like, downloading the PDF and printing it.

  96. Not an MA anymore*

    I was hired as an orthopedic medical assistant with very little training (first permanent job out of college during the recession) and was asked to start putting casts on patients without any real training whatsoever. As you can imagine, this was a disaster and resulted in some really bad yelp reviews (and a lot of the casts I did needing to be done over by someone who was actually trained properly). I would always get yelled at when I did something wrong, but I was never formally taught what to do. All of the other MA’s had attended a special workshop, and when I asked to go, was told no, it’s too expensive. “Figure it out. Learn from someone here.”

  97. SmoothieGirl*

    I worked at a failing smoothie shop during college. My paychecks started bouncing, and they asked me to keep working while they sorted it out. The first time I did. The second time, I told them I wouldn’t be back. I had to get my father-in-law to help pressure them to finally pay me.

  98. Am I Laughing or Crying*

    A higher up in a company I worked for once made our creative team design and produce individual player cards for their child’s high school baseball team. It wasn’t even a “Hey, can you do me this favor?” thing to one designer either; it was an official assignment with a department project number that collectively probably 10-15 people had to work on.

    At another company, one of the highest-up executives was very hands-on with my department’s biggest annual project and during the months we were working on it would spend a couple of hours two or three days a week in one of our conference rooms to review various materials related to it. These weren’t “sitting around a table” meetings; the exec would sit on the floor to look at the materials (lots of papers spread out/getting shuffled around). One day the exec complained that there was an air conditioning vent right above the spot in the room where they always sat and the air would blow down their shirt and make them cold. Rather than choose a different spot, the exec made the facilities team move the vent.

  99. Amy Farrah Fowler*

    Not that bad, but my boss had a bunch of papers he wanted organized into a binder for a presentation. I asked what order things were supposed to go in and he said to talk to another employee about it. I met with him and he basically blew me off and said the order didn’t matter (this was a huge binder, like probably a ream of paper in it). So I hole-punched everything, had no dividers or guidance and put the binder on my boss’ desk. He called me in on my day off to “fix it” before his presentation. I told him the other employee had been no help, but it was still my responsibility to fix it.

  100. Tape Recorder Tears*

    My ex-boss was the owner of a small teapot manufacturing firm. He also was an obsessive cataloger of his own life and saved everything going back decades, which he stored in a room on site. I was hired as a teapot designer but after he fired the woman he had on staff as an archivist, he roped me into that position as well (this was during the pandemic, and I was not in a position to turn down work even if it was onsite). My boss had real issues working with women and I would routinely cry in the bathroom after one of his humiliating “inspections” of my work that involved him shouting and berating me in front of my male colleagues. (This was excruciatingly typical for how he treated women – but I never, ever saw him do this to any man on staff.) One of my tasks was to catalogue his answering machine tapes from the 90s. It turns out, these tapes contained multiple recordings of crying women calling his answering machine and detailing the hurtful things he had done. One of these women was on staff at another location which added an extra layer of weird. He would have me play these tapes for the whole office to hear and laugh and laugh, and I would have to sit there in front of him and transcribe the contents. I am still convinced to this day he saw nothing unusual about this at all. Fortunately I finally got out of there and am in a role where everyone treats me well (and I almost tripled my salary!)

    2. pancakes*

      Omg. There are a lot of creepy bosses and coworkers described in these comments but I think this one takes the biscuit!

    3. Your Local Password Resetter*

      What in the actual flick. That is downright traumatizing.
      I’m so glad you escaped that abusive creep.

    5. Ally McBeal*

      Good lord. I would’ve accidentally set a box or two of those tapes on fire. Or accidentally dropped them in the trash compactor. Or accidentally let them roll into a lake.

  101. Ms. Hagrid Frizzle*

    Oh, and when I was an undergraduate intern in a research lab, I was assigned to a particularly obnoxious PhD student who:
    1) Demanded I dig all 50 2 ft x 3ft holes (1.5 ft deep) at our experimental field when only 20 were for my experiment – and I had a cast on my dominant arm!!!
    2) Forgot about the containers of beetle larvae he was rearing for his dissertation work in a different lab’s storage closet on a different floor. When the other lab told him to remove them, he brought them to me to clean and count. These things were filled with spiderwebs and mold.
    3) Routinely scheduled 7 AM meetings only to no-show and cancel them at 7:45 AM. My hours were supposed to start at 9 AM. After the third time, I started ignoring the meeting requests and not showing up until my scheduled start. PhDork would usually wander in at 10AM, “apologize” for making me show up early, and then dismiss me 2 hours early to make up for it.

    1. LondonLady*

      AHA yes, flashbacks to toxic new boss who drove me and others to leave lovely old job. I worked a lot of evenings and so had a later office start time than some. He would schedule my 1:1 at 8.30 or 9am, at least an hour before my usual start time, and then not turn up. I think he disliked our flexible schedules and thought this was a good way to get more work out of us. It was not.

  102. LTR/FTP*

    At my very first job as a teen, the owner of the business somehow discovered that I’d never seen porn. (This was the 80s so it was a little harder to source… also, I was 15.) The boss lived in an apartment above the store and told me I had to go to his apartment and watch a porn video, and if I didn’t he’d dock my pay. While I was over there, he and another male coworker listened over the intercom from the store.

    When I told people this story at the time, they thought it was funny! Who wouldn’t rather watch porn than work, amirite? It was only when I retold this story as a #metoo incident in recent years that people responded with any sort of shock or dismay.

    1. Admin extraordinare*

      I’m so sorry! It’s classic abuser behavior to surprise expose people to sexually explicit materials. Happened to me once too, went to a co workers house to help them pick something up and there were graphic porn dvd cases on every available surface (this was way back in the 90s). And they knew I was coming over too and I was still in high school. Gross.

      1. Dragon_Dreamer*

        I had a customer who would try to pull that, changing his computer background and screen saver to nude photos of women, then insist that only I work on the machine. Which always had a whitish film on the keyboard. I always refused to touch the damned things. And he never figured out why he kept getting them back with a black background and a generic screen saver.

    2. American Job Venter*

      I wish I could beam this experience into the heads of everyone who; has derided the #metoo movement, starting with the commenters here who have. What was inflicted on you is no less than utterly disgusting.

  103. Pixies' Dust*

    Got asked to work illegal overtime without compensation. In writing. When I protested, the individual indicated, again in writing, that he knew it was illegal. It got handled, probably only because it was in writing. I was also quietly pulled aside for a conversation about how “at that level,” I needed to be setting aside those antiquated notions. Like following the law, apparently.

    Mind you, I worked plenty of hours over what I should have been, and only documented them when I was in a bad mood or trying to make a point about being overloaded.

    It got even better when I was accidentally forwarded the email chain discussing what a terrible, entitled person I was, with all those highfalutin’ expectations.

    I GTFO, and am back now and in charge. The person who put things in writing was oddly the last standing of those involved, and finally skedaddled when he realized he’d have to deal with me again.

  104. Veryanon*

    This was my first job as a teenager. I worked at a local ice cream place (think along the lines of Dairy Queen). Our bathrooms were on the outside of the restaurant; you could only access them by using a key that we provided. One evening my supervisor asked me to clean the mens’ room. I went in there, and there were feces *everywhere.* Literally everywhere. In the sink, on the floor, on the walls…everywhere. It looked like someone had taken a giant poo in the sink (why?????), and then just smeared it all over the place. It would have taken hours to clean. The smell was indescribable. Frankly, they should have hired a professional janitorial team to clean up that mess. I have never been so grossed out in my life (I’ve raised children, so I know what the human body is capable of producing).

    I turned around and went back inside, explained to my supervisor what was going on, and told her I would not do it. She threatened to fire me. So I took off my apron, gave it to her, and left in the middle of my shift. I then explained to my parents why I had quit my job, and they completely understood. I never went back there after that, and about a year later they went out of business.

    1. Mr. Shark*

      Similar experience at my first job. The Asst Mgr (night shift) asked us to clean the restroom, in which someone had taken a poo on the floor. Everyone of us refused, so he ended up cleaning it up. We didn’t even threaten to quit, we just said no.

  105. GermanCoffeeGirl*

    I have so many, but these are the two that instantly came to mind:

    – I was working as a legal EA in a small law office and my boss (a young male lawyer) had a (male) client whose wife had left him and taken the kids with her. According to sources of this client, his wife was staying at a women’s shelter. The addresses of women’s shelters are (rightfully) not made public here in Germany, so my boss asked me to call the shelter and act as if I were a potential customer in order to get the address. I told him in no certain terms that I would absolutely not be doing that and that he should be ashamed for asking in the first place.

    – This didn’t happen to me, but to a colleague while working in a large international law firm. In 2010, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted and basically stopped all air travel for about a week – there were no flights over the Atlantic or Europe. A partner of our law firm was stuck in New York and needed to return to Germany, but there were no flights. This partner called my colleague and yelled at her to contact his airline of choice, tell them (quote) “WHO HE WAS” and DEMAND that they fly him to Europe. She replied with “if the chancellor of Germany has to travel by bus since there are no flights, I don’t think they’ll make an exception for you”.

    1. Sapientia*

      Dear me! Thank you for standing up to your boss about the women’s shelter. I do hope he saw the error of his ways, but even if he didn’t, I’m glad you told him he should be ashamed of himself for asking.

  106. Dwight Schrute*

    Exclude people who were Black from a clinical trial as they had “too many in the trial already”. No I did not do it. I refused to continue screening for the study and let my supervisor push back on it

    2. American Job Venter*

      In another discussion a commenter said that racism doesn’t affect science. I wonder if they’ll see this example.

      Thank you for refusing to be part of that malarkey.

        1. American Job Venter*

          This was a side thread in the discussion of Lara the Coworker Who Won’t Stop Ranting About Why She Won’t Get a Covid Shot.

  107. littlebumbletea*

    Held an event during the day at a beautiful space with a mainly glass ceiling. The president of my company kept requesting I ask the venue to turn down the lights for a short video portion (he picked the venue). They were as turned down as much as they could be, but he asked me again and stood there staring to watch me ask because he didn’t think they had turned any lights down at all. I had to bite the bullet and take the L. I think the venue coordinator could see how much I didn’t want to ask this question, but at least the president was in earshot when they responded “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we can’t turn down the sun.”

  108. LadyByTheLake*

    I worked (briefly) for a boss who was always trying to get everyone to bend the rules for him — it was almost a game to see what he could get away with, except that he was really upset when they wouldn’t. There were so many bizarre things he asked for that it is hard to choose, but one of my favorites was when he left for the airport only fifteen minutes before his flight (definitely not enough time to even get there during rush hour) and he wanted me to call the airline and tell them that he was delayed due to an accident on the freeway and get them to hold the plane for him. This was not some little regional plane or airport or airline — he wanted me to call Delta and tell them to hold an entire major jet flying from Atlanta to NYC because he was playing his game to see how far he could push things. I made the call (it was often easier to just do the silly things, and save my refusals for illegal things) and got a very confused Delta representative on the phone who, after he got over his confusion, rebooked my boss on a later flight.

    1. Regular Human Accountant*

      I worked for someone like this, who would ask me to do the most impossible things and then would get angry when I couldn’t do it. No, the county is not going to change property tax due dates for you. Yes, you have to apply for your TSA Pre-Check in person; no, they won’t talk to you on the phone. Infuriating.

      1. LadyByTheLake*

        OMG — it sounds like the same guy. No, the federal court is not going to change its filing deadlines for you. Yes, you can get a passport expedited, but not overnight and not when there’s no emergency, and not when you don’t have the paperwork (or a photo) completed, and no, the head the passport office in DC (if I could even figure out who that is) is not going to get on the phone so you can explain why you deserve an exception.

  109. Anna*

    Ooh, I only remembered this after reading all the excellent office supply stories, but I had a boss, an older gentleman, who decided he wanted to be cc’d on all of our emails…like all of them, including just interoffice back-and-forth conversations. Which, fine, but then the kicker was that he wasn’t super comfortable reading on his computer, so asked us to print out all of our emails and give them to him monthly. So, we all had boxes by our desks where we would print out and stack up all of our email printouts, and then carry full boxes into his office monthly. It did only last for a couple of months before he was completely overwhelmed and decided we could just flag important things for him going forward.

            1. HistoryGeek*

              This is what a friend of mine refers to as “the argument that wins itself”. No need to try to reason with the person, just…wait.

  110. HigherEdAdminista*

    I was asked to deal with an unreasonable patron who wouldn’t take no for an answer and wanted to speak with my boss. This person had gotten themselves into a situation that was going to end up messing up their life, and they waited until the last minute to do something about it. When I explained that we couldn’t help them and tried to point them in a different direction, they wouldn’t accept it and so they came by multiple times trying to rehash the same situation. I went through it over and over again and all they wanted was to speak with the boss; this was making me take hours of of my day and really dread coming to work.

    My boss refused to ever come out and shut things down for the patron. A no from him would have been a dead end, but he didn’t like dealing with confrontation so he left me hanging over and over again until finally I was able to convince this person that they needed to pursue a different option.

    I had never before experienced a manager who just left an employee in this kind of situation. Even when I was in retail, managers stepped in most of the time to deal with these tense situations… they certainly didn’t leave them to drag on for days and days.

    1. AdequateAdmin*

      The GM at my last job would do something similar. She made a habit of promising things to customers, then things would get set back or be unable to be done, and she’d apparently not tell them? So then the customer would come in a get mad with those of us up front working the retail portion of the operation. On the occasion we could track her down and tell her a there was an irritated customer, she would often tell us to just tell them it would be done “soon” and was very reluctant to come deal with the iriate customer. GM would also ignore calls from these customers and frequently leave for untold hours at a time, supposedly doing business things but also equally as likely having an affair with the owner, and leave us to deal with customers who she had ignored calls from. It was great.

      1. Artemesia*

        I did hiring for our department for all the non -tenure track roles (we hired full time teachers with PhDs as well as people who were primarily researchers — so that we did not have adjuncts or grad students teaching undergrad classes). Our chair who was a major wheeler dealer type (and very effective at grant getting and such — would make all sorts of promises about salary or perks to desired candidates, or sometimes to spouses of people being hired for major tenured positions who were offered instructional positions. Often these promises were counter policy or impossible to deliver on and I got to be the lucky person to deal with this. And I was on the employees side here and did the best I could for them — but having to deal with this repeatedly was a drag. And of course someone who starts work for you with broken promises is likely to have a less than great attitude.

  111. The Dogman*

    Fun one: I was a burger chucker at the biggest chain of burger chucking establishments. I happened to share the same name ar the then CEO of the UK Headoffice.

    More than once I was asked to call other stores and say “Hey I’m xxxx xxxxxx, can you send some big mac buns to the yyyyyyy store as soon as possible please? Thank you so much!” Since I have a posh-ish English accent we got away with this one for years until the CEO changed. Pretty sure I would have been fired if the boss had ever found out.

    Less fun: I was asked to cut off the gas to a large number of poor families who were in arrears only due to the mistakes made by the gas company I was working for. Someone muppet in billing had screwed up badly, some wombles in IT had failed to fix it after numerous complaints, some C-suite melons had managed to get their noses in slings thinking the poors were “getting away with stealing Gas and Electric!!!” and so the order came down from on high that I would have to cut off gas and electric to well over 1000 families.

    1 week before Christmas.

    With no way to turn them back on before Christmas.

    Again through no fault of their own. 100% on the corporation and the C-suiters knew it was on the corporation and not on the customers.

    I sent the email directly to the press (remember when we had that and not the corporate monculture “24 hr news” nonsence?), and to Trading Standards with all the evidence of criminal malfeasance and immoral activities. I snent it openly from my corporate email account and I CC’d in all the C-suite folks, my managers, the union and the MP of the area affected.

    Then I packed my desk and waited to be fired, didn’t take long! ;) Under 10 mins anyway…

    Then I went to talk to a lawyer with a union representative, but was also offered a decent payout to leave and not talk about this to the press anymore, they did not cut off the customers and they sorted the accounting mistakes in under 24 hours.

    That was my last big corporate office job, stuck to bar tending after that, it was much less stressful stopping fights and calling for ambulances than hearing poor people stressing and not being able to do much to help them.

      1. The Dogman*

        Your are very kind, I do wish it was not heroic and just standard behaviour.

        Some people I worked with were fine with cutting the people off.

      1. The Dogman*

        I think I have too much understated Britishness is built in for me to accept the hero moniker internally, but you are very kind to say so!

      1. The Dogman*

        Thank you, my partner says she agrees with this, but I would hope most decent people would do the same.

    6. Ally McBeal*

      I see from your reply comments that you’re sort of uncomfortable with the “hero” moniker, but here’s a related story that will hopefully help make you more comfortable. I dated a great guy a few years ago who worked as a supervisor at a food-manufacturing plant. Their main product is one that can be certified kosher, and one day he informed his management team that the kosher part of the plant needed to be cleaned in order to pass an upcoming inspection by the mashgiach (the rabbi who does the certifying). They told him no, because the facility couldn’t be offline for that long or it would impact profits, so he should just lie to the mashgiach. Which meant that the vast majority of American Jews who keep kosher (up to 50% of AJs, depending on which studies you look at) would soon be unknowingly eating non-kosher food. He appealed several times to no avail, and finally gave his 2-week notice and prepared to go to a whistleblower agency. Fortunately, the head office caught wind of what happened and fired/demoted his management team instead, and begged him to come back.

      You took on real personal risk/hardship to stand up for the human rights of vulnerable people. That kind of integrity is quite uncommon. You are a hero.

    7. Old Admin*

      I applaud you. I hope Trading Standards gave the company a hard time.
      It’s sad you had to keep mum to get your payout, but I perfectly understand you can fight a broken system only sometimes, not all the time.

  112. TechWriter*

    Can I offer some fluff to counteract the jaws-on-floor?

    On summer break in university, I worked at a garden centre/farm stand in my parents’ small town. It quickly became apparent that I knew nothing about greenhouse plants, so I was mostly tasked with planting asparagus, picking berries, harvesting potatoes, and other odd-jobs around the various vegetable fields, including ripping around in a gator, driving a tractor, and running into town with the the owner’s truck. For a kid who grew up in the suburbs, it was pretty fun being a farm hand, though did come with some unusual requests.

    My very first day, the owner asked me to take his truck and go drop off a check at the bank. Where were the keys? In the ignition. I don’t think it was a test.

    Once I was asked if I wanted to “deal with” the racoon he’d trapped in the cornfield (my slightly horrified “no” was fully accepted).

    The best task of all was when the barn cat had kittens. We got to take a few ten-minute “kitten breaks” a day to go attempt to acclimate the kittens to humans so they could be sold or given away. (Honestly, we failed miserably, and they were feral beasts with tiny needle teeth, but it sure was fun!)

    1. HerdingCatsWouldBeEasier*

      I had a lot of relatives who farmed growing up, and the adults swore by this tip for taming barn kittens to us kids: every time you catch them, smear their front paws with butter just before you release them. Supposedly, they eat the butter and start associating good things with humans. I can remember summers on various farms with various cousins chasing down barn kittens, forcing them to snuggle, and then coating their paws with butter. I still to this day have no idea if this was just a way to get us kids out of the adults’ hair or not, but the adult cats on these farms were always very friendly.

      1. Zephy*

        Oh, the butter trick! I’ve used a version of that when introducing a new cat to the family – put a tiny smear of butter on the interloper’s head. Resident Cat licks it off but also thinks “oh, I’m grooming this guy, we must be buddies,” Interloper thinks “cool, I’m getting groomed, we must be buddies.”

      2. KoiFeeder*

        I’ve also heard lard, beef tallow, and my favorite version ever, the person who would put the kittens in a tiny kitten papoose with a chicken kebab (not an actual kebab, but raw chicken liver and other organ meats on a stick).

      1. Mazey's Mom*

        The pandemic made that happen for me. :) Although the kitten is not so kitten-sized anymore…

  113. SlimeKnight*

    About 10 years ago I worked in a big-box retail store in the back end (receiving/shipping). There was a large trash compactor back there. If you can picture it, there was a chute in the wall leading to big bin connected to the compactor. The first thing you learn in safety training when you’re hired is DON’T GET IN THE COMPACTOR BIN YOU IDIOT. YOU WILL DIE AND THE COMPACTOR IS LOUD AND NO ONE WILL EVEN HEAR YOU SCREAM.

    One morning we came in and somebody dropped a ton of pallets into the bin the night before and it got jammed up. The trash from the night before was still pilled up in front the chute. We had been working on CAREFULLY clearing the jam for two hours after the store opened. An assistant manager came around and was mad because there was just trash sitting out in the back. He demanded that we GET IN the compactor bin and JUMP UP AND DOWN on the pallets to clear the jam.

    None of us would do it, so he climbed into the bin and started jumping up and down on the trash pile. Several of us took our phones out and started filming, at which point he started yelling obscenities at us (while still jumping up and down on the trash). I was in the middle of sending the video to corporate when our store safety officer came running around the corner, screaming, “GET OUT OF THE TRASH COMPACTOR YOU !@$$!@$!@#$!@.” The safety officer called some Big Boss at Corporate. Corporate Big Boss fired the Assistant Manager on speaker phone in front of us all.

    1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      Had a similar thing happen at a nearby store when I was working for Fancy Grocery Store. Assistant manager decided to haze 2 new employees by having them climb in the open cardboard crusher to clean out the scraps that collect at the bottom, then closing the gate and starting the hydraulic piston. Manager walked into the back room, saw what was happening, slammed the emergency stop button, and fired the assistant manager on the spot.

      1. Robin Ellacott*

        What a monster!! You thought you were going to die, LOLZ. Glad the assistant manager was fired, but yikes.

      3. Observer*

        The first guy was probably just a totally idiot. A dangerous idiot, to be sure, but “just” and idiot”. This one is flat out evil. Even if he was SURE it was safe, he’s evil.

      4. Artemesia*

        A friend of mine in college lost her father in a giant pulp digester when he went in to correct a problem and the safeties failed or it wasn’t properly shut down and it started up. Glad these companies take it this seriously. Imagine. Imagine doing that to haze somebody – like hazing never goes wrong.

        1. SlimeKnight*

          For all it’s faults, this chain at the very least did not want its employees to die in painfully stupid ways (for liability reasons, I’m sure). For example, this store has very tall, metal shelving. During your annual training, what’s drilled into your brain is: DON’T CLIMB ON THE SHELVES!!! Use a ladder or power equipment instead.

          We had a new assistant manager (if you can see see there is a common theme among these people) who wanted us to reset a store display, but the ladders/power equipment were all in use on the other side of the store. He wanted it done NOW and told us to climb up there. So we all said now, and he climbed up there (like 20 feet up), and started throwing boxes and product down at us.

          What’s great is that there was a Regional VP based out of our store and the rack the Assistant Manager had climbed up was in direct view of his office. He literally paged out over the store intercom: “Hey, dummy Assistant Manager up in the shelves. This is Big Boss. You’re fired.”

  114. twocents*

    It’s not really unreasonable in terms of work, but in terms of humanity.

    When I was 16-18, I worked at Target, and of course, we all received training on what to do if there was a lost child. One day, there was a woman wandering through the store, tears down her face, and she was speaking in a foreign language. The girl I was training that day happened to recognize it, and was able to calm the woman down enough to learn that her child was missing. Just when we were trying to get the information about the missing kid so I could call it in — which would have put all the store employees on alert to find the kid — our store manager advised that we needed to quit “chit chatting” and go back to work. We tried to tell her there was a missing kid and the mother didn’t speak English, but she didn’t care; calling it in would have affected her SLAs and that was more important to her.

    We were 17 or so, so we did what we were told, but it was so heart breaking to walk away from a distressed mother just because the manager cared more about timing than guests’ safety.

    1. Observer*

      I’m going to disagree- it’s also unreasonable in terms of work. Missing kids can be very, very bad business for a company.

  115. Dramatic Romantic*

    Who among us hasn’t been asked to pick up their boss’s cocaine from their dealer? Because their wife had a tracker on their car, and would know if he was meeting with his dealer.

    I declined and did not go back to work after lunch (come to think of it, I did not get paid for the 3.5 days I worked there).

    1. El l*

      Yeah, taking a drug possession rap for the boss is not typically listed on job responsibility sheets.

    2. tjamls*

      I was told that if a client asks for cocaine or hookers, I better figure out really fast how to come up with cocaine or hookers. Luckily, I was never asked and never figured it out beyond a tip I was given in that initial conversation.

  116. NYWeasel*

    My first job out of college was working as a general office assistant for this trio of outrageous NYers. One was a drunk, one was a bully, and the third who I thankfully didn’t see too often was a psychopath who was rumored to have killed people…and I could easily believe it. You’d think the third would have the most impositions, but he stayed away 99% of the time bc thankfully he despised the other two. Instead it was the bully who assigned me my first job of falsifying records for some insurance fraud he had going on. At the time I was broke AF and needed the paycheck so I shut my mouth and did it. A year or so later, when I was less desperate, he tried bullying me into making a cash transaction for him that would violate all sorts of accounting principles. I looked him in the eye and thanked him for the time I’d spent there and then walked off the job. Best part was that I actually got another job that I started that day, so when they tried calling me after I’d “had time to cool down” I was like “Sorry, I’ve got another job now. I’m gone.”

  117. Anon for Now*

    At my first professional job I was almost immediately asked to edit a cartoon from The New York Post to say something about an advertiser. I had to argue with them over whether or not it was a copyright violation. I won that round, but not the one where an advertiser insisted on using the slogan, “What’s in your wallet?” to advertise his store discount card.

    I also had to raise hell to make them scrap a cookbook that would have contained copyrighted recipes that readers submitted. Our office manager didn’t believe you could copyright a recipe.

    1. Anna*

      Oh my god, as a graphic designer, the arguments I’ve had with clients that finding it on google does not mean it is free use!

    2. Plant*

      Super sketchy, but recipes themselves generally aren’t eligible for copyright. They are considered too functional and not creative enough.

    3. JB*

      Your boss was right. Recipes generally aren’t protected by copyright, unless they include additional, copyrightable material.

      1. JB*

        I’m also confused on how the recipes were collected – how was there no additional language to waive any rights that might have been found, regardless? Were the readers originally asked to submit recipes for some employee’s personal use, and then boss turned around and decided to make a cookbook from them?

        I am having a hard time imagining a realistic situation where the readers could have been submitting recipes WITHOUT understanding that they were giving your company some or all of the rights, if any rights existed.

    4. ArtK*

      Check with an IP attorney. It’s also my belief that you cannot copyright a simple list of materials and basic instructions (i.e. a “recipe.”) Only a collection of recipes can be copyright. I’d love to hear from an IP attorney here if I’m wrong on that understanding.

      A quick search shows documents from the US Copyright office that backs up that assumption. It’s all those anecdotes that bloggers include with their recipes that are subject to copyright. The courts have upheld that opinion, see Tomaydo-Tomahdo, LLC v. Vozary.

  118. Admin extraordinaire*

    I used to work at a movie theater. We were in a strip with some other businesses and we shared this space behind the building where all the dumpsters were hidden, far from the prying eyes on any customer. But it was gross back there, and at one point there was a half-eaten, albino rat corpse under our dumpster for weeks. Just sitting there like a warning to others. Imagine my horror when my manager appeared with a snow shovel and told my coworker to go outside and use it to clean up the dead rat. She refused, so did I. Eventually the manager found someone else to clean it up. But for all the managers out there: if you care so much about a dead rat under the dumpster, then you take the snow shovel and go clean it up.

  119. Meep*

    This blog is a blessing. Sometimes it makes me realize my Toxic Coworker/Former Manager is really a lot of other people’s bad (and unethical, slimy) bosses rolled up into one tiny 5 foot 4 inch package. Other times, it makes her look like a decent person.

    Obligatory bad coworker story (since there will forever be so many) – A coworker’s grandmother passed away. Rather than being a decent human being and saying “Take the rest of the week off to grieve. I will let payroll know you are taking bereavement leave.” she made this girl put it in as vacation time and didn’t even bother to approve it. Meanwhile, I did all the heavy lifting of what a company exec SHOULD do – bought a card, make sure her work was covered, etc, and even made her a blanket (that My Toxic Coworker of course tried to claim credit for) out of my own pocket. When she got back Toxic Coworker didn’t ask how she was holding up. Just dumped work on her lap.

    1. Batcat71*

      That’s horrible! When my mom passed I was allowed 2 days off. One while she passed in hospice and the next day. That’s it. It was counted asVacation time too.

    2. Storm in a teacup*

      Omg this is so awful.
      It reminds me of a terrible manager.
      Absolutely minimal empathy or emotional intelligence.
      My grandmother passed away and I asked to take the day before the funeral and the funeral off as I needed to drive my father up the day before to perform some pre-funeral rights. There was no humanity or compassion AT ALL. She looked me in the eye and said ‘well you cannot have the day before as bereavement leave as it’s your grandmother and not immediate family so you’ll have to take it as annual leave if you insist and make sure your clinical work is covered before you go.’ As a senior manager in the department I knew the policy was up to 5 days leave at the manager’s discretion. The clinical rota was her responsibility to sort, so when I went to her with a plan for cover, she got annoyed that I overstepped.
      Then 6 weeks later my uncle was dying in hospital on the other side of the city and my mother called asking if I could pick my cousin up from the station and bring her to the hospital to see her father as they were going to turn off the machine. She was sitting her final year university exams so was rushing back. I went to speak to my manager and got asked only ‘What is the latest time you can leave?’
      A few months later at my exit interview when asked why I was leaving I was honest and told her that it was due directly to how she treated me in the 2 situations above. She was !

      Apparently in her prior role she’d had an employee who’s mother had passed and she thought she was very supportive but the employee complained that she had been causing her pain by bringing it up all the time and so she was just being professional with me.
      The rest of the exit interview was me explaining that being humane does not equate unprofessional and actually as a manager she should be supporting her staff when something like this happens to navigate the practicalities at work and how that’s totally different to constantly asking someone daily about their grief.
      Last I heard she’d applied for the director role at our old place but didn’t get it as she wasn’t thought to possess the strategic understanding required.

      1. irene adler*

        “not immediate family” sheesh!!

        My tech, a woman in her early 60’s, needed bereavement leave. Her mother had passed away unexpectedly over the weekend. Sure, I said. Take what you need. Employee manual says you get 3 days for this. Just mark the time card with “bereavement leave-mother passed away” on the days you are out. Don’t sweat the work tasks-we’ll cover them.

        Well! Afterwards, the CFO followed up with this and informed me that bereavement leave for my tech was disallowed. Told me I needed to be more careful on who gets bereavement leave and who needs to take PTO for things like this.

        Then CFO marched over to the tech to inform her she was not getting bereavement leave for the days she took as this is reserved for immediate family. “My mother is not immediate family?”, tech says. “Oh,” CFO says, “no one told me it was your mother.”

        “Says so right on the time card,” tech pointed out.

        CFO claims she didn’t buy this as people in their 60’s have usually outlived their parents.

      2. Old Admin*

        I have a “not immediate family” story, too.
        My sister died after a long illness, and I had to catch a plane from Germany to attend the funeral on very short notice. I applied for and got bereavement leave, stayed three days and returned to work, still wearing mourning.

        The same say, I was called in by my supervisor and informed that per German law, siblings did not count as immediate family for bereavement leave, only parents and children. Therefore, the leave was retracted and I had to take what little PTO I had and an unpaid day off (or put in overtime).
        I argued I had been told it was *company policy* to give said leave for deceased siblings, and was told they had made a mistake and were sticking to the law (which was changed a few years later).

        I stood in front of of boss, still in mourning clothes and dazed from the rapid trips between time zones (and dealing with a horrendous narcissistic mother) and said in a cold, flat voice: “If retracting my leave is what Company wants, then that is what Company will get.”
        (Still in the job, but looking.)

    3. Miss Muffet*

      My dad had been on life support in another state from where I lived, and my mom called me home to say goodbye, so I jump on a plane that day. I was fully prepared for a funeral. Got home, he had actually recovered enough to be taken off life support! Hooray! But I was still fairly new to the company and had very little PTO. She wouldn’t approve me for bereavement time because “he didn’t actually die.”

    4. RebelwithMouseyHair*

      When my mother died, it was the weekend, I just sent an email to say I was off to the UK and didn’t know when I’d be back because of my mother dying.
      It was just before Easter, and there were admin things holding stuff up so it was nearly 2 weeks before we managed to have the funeral.
      My boss kept harassing my partner to find out when I’d be back because there was no Internet at my Dad’s place.
      I got back after two weeks, there was a heap of work waiting for me on my desk. The boss said “my condolences for your mother did you see the file I left on your keyboard?” no punctuation because he didn’t wait for me to acknowledge his condolences.
      He then tried to weasel out of paying for bereavement leave – I was entitled to one day for the funeral plus two days for travelling since it wasn’t possible to go there and back in a day. He didn’t tell the accountant it was for my mother, he forgot that there was a public holiday in the midst of the leave I took and since I only had a few days leave at that point, he told the accountant to take the extra days from my leave for the next holiday period. I had to fight tooth and nail to get the bereavement leave, and even the Easter holiday. Somehow there was one day that was still disputed by the boss, and then at the end of May he told me that I was entitled to it, but I should have used it by end May so now I was losing it.
      At that point, the accountant got angry with him and said I should be able to take that day any time I wanted since I hadn’t even known I could have it until it was too late.
      She needed a translation done a few days later, I did it for her for free, on the boss’s time, behind his back, because.

  120. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

    First job out of college, I ended up part time on a team prepping paperwork for digitalization. It wasn’t going well; most of us weren’t actually working and were just socializing during the half-day. One day, the manager/project leader pulled me aside and told me that she’s firing the rest of the team and to just go along with it and pretend I was being fired, too. I didn’t really agree or refuse to do so, and let everyone around me just make assumptions that I didn’t confirm or deny either way.

    1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      A close second was my first Christmas at my current job, which I spent making unnecessary changes to make a client’s setup worse because our VP had decided it was easier to do a lot of bad work than think through an hour or two of good work. It took me 4 years to finally fully sunset all the mistakes in design we made that week. I went along with it; I hadn’t built enough credibility yet to dig in my heels and say “Hell no.”

  121. TB*

    I was an assistant manager for a retail operation- our Regional Director was awful, a complete narcissist and egomaniac. He always threw around his power, especially with me and my fellow assistant manager because we were young and female (he was a total jerk to our manager as well, but more aggro, because our manager was male). A couple of things he made us do, off the top of my head:

    Called me and my fellow assistant to our manager office- which was SUPER out of the way and completely took us away from our operation, which was in a small theme park. He said he had a really important task for us, and since we had only met him for the first time the day before, we thought…you know…it would actually be important. SO we let our employee’s know we wouldn’t be a available for a bit (at a peak time on a peak day, but what else could we do?). We got to our manager office, and then our Regional Director started bragging, of all things, about his Tumi bag. He literally called us to the office to make us GO TO THE TUMI WEBSITE AND FIND HIS BAG SO WE COULD TELL HIM HOW MUCH IT COST. Which he already knew. It was a super weird power play, and I think he genuinely did it because he thought we would be impressed? I to this day can’t see a Tumi store or bag without cringing.

    Later in his tenure, he pulled me away from my operation (again- this was a pretty frequent thing when he was visitng) and told me that he didn’t have time to do his expense reports, that I would need to do it, and that he was giving me $40 under the table to do it…and that I needed to do it during work hours and ignore my team until it was done, because it was overdue. Great. I felt SO squidgy doing this, but also didn’t really feel like I had a choice, so I did…and was disconcerted to see that he spent triple my monthly salary that month on things like Hooters and strip clubs- he had to “wine and dine” potential clients, of course :eyeroll:

    He ended up getting fired for sexually harassing the other ASM- he was a large 50 year old black man, which is only relevant because he would frequently make thinly veiled sexual comments to her, 21 years old and like 95 pounds soaking wet- the one that comes to mind was him taking her out for a “work lunch” to get fried chicken, take a huge bite of chicken, smacking his lips while making eye contact with her and saying “I just love…white meat” in like the creepiest tone possible. GOOD RIDDANCE.

  122. Not an ophthalmologist*

    I administered prescription eye drops to a member of our board of directors during a board meeting. Nonprofits are a little quirky.

    1. Zona the Great*

      ha! I just administered eye drops to a contractor who came to my house to fix something. Sometimes we just really need to human-up and ask someone to help us don’t we? hehe. I recently had to ask a total stranger to help me get out of my jumpsuit. Ugh.

  123. lisa*

    My very first full-time job after school was as an executive assistant to the CEO of a small nonprofit. The CEO came out of his office one day and told me, “Get Bill Gates on the phone for me.” I stared at him and said that I doubted I could get Bill Gates’ assistant on the phone, much less Bill Gates. Oh no, he said, just tell him the CEO of needs to speak to him right away. I pretended to try calling, but didn’t really …

  124. A&D*

    I was made to attend a court hearing wearing jeans. The partner at the firm had not realized she had court that day (!!!) and she was in jeans as well, but chose to send me to court instead. Got told in open court by the judge that my attire was unacceptable and I had to say “Oh I know, I’m so sorry” with no opportunity to be like “Believe me this was NOT my choice.”

  125. Frankie Bergstein*

    I was on a work trip abroad — think several time zones away. My colleague had a psychotic break.

    None of us knew what was happening — she didn’t have a history of mental illness that anyone was aware of. She had no idea what was happening, thought ghosts were coming out of the microwave, was behaving erratically etc. I had to escort her back to my employer’s major U.S. city and get her to her husband without 1) the airline staff finding out or 2) explaining the situation to someone in front of her or 3) losing her; she kept running off.

    1. Dramatic Romantic*

      Was there some type of gas leak or chemical exposure that could have explained the symptoms?

      2. JB*

        Do you really think that’s more likely than garden-variety psychosis?

        I know it’s scary, but some mental illnesses just cause rapid onset psychosis in adults – or the appearance of rapid onset (if the person is able to hide symptoms…up until they’re not.)

  126. Anon for this*

    Decades ago, I would pay my boss’s sex workers (who came to the office) out of the account from which he was a trustee for his relatives.

  127. Similarly Situated*

    My boss made me buy groceries for him to donate to a food drive. I did not get reimbursed.

  128. Melissa*

    The owner of a company I used to work for had one of our B2B call center staff call his housekeeper and fire her, because the call center staff member spoke Spanish and so did the housekeeper.

    The housekeeper also spoke English.

  129. Zona the Great*

    I’ve told this one before here: I worked for a large bath and beauty shop that exists in all malls in America. Once the regional manager came to my store and asked me to dance in the entrance to our store with our products to lure people in. I was so insulted that I was far less than professional in my “Hell No and never ask again” response.

    I also once worked in a bank where a man was waiting for a banker. He decided he was waiting too long so he calmly and quietly got up to leave. My boss hollered at me to chase the man out of the building to get him to stay. I refused. She was angry. She chased him out of the bank instead. He just looked at her like she was nuts and said he’d try again after lunch.

  130. WonkyStitch*

    Nothing unreasonable, just annoying. Like the manager who learned I had good Photoshop skills, so he asked me to format all of his presentation for the all-staff meetings with Dilbert cartoons and such, and never even said thanks. I was a recruiter, not a graphic designer. Just ridiculously eager to please a manager who would never approve of me.

  131. Lady Cerevisiae*

    When I was a grad student, I had a big push on a project where I spent literally 30 days in a row only eating, sleeping, and working. A few days after that, I mentioned to my boss how intense it had been, how I had done nothing but work, and how I hadn’t see my boyfriend or any friends at all.

    And he said, “Well, I don’t want to tell you to never see your boyfriend again, but you should be keeping up this level of intensity for the rest of your PhD.” Aka, 3-4 more years. I did not do that.

  132. Lee grant*

    I work at a small museum. We had a homeless issue. One employee had to find used needles in the parking lot every morning. They wore gloves and used a grabber tool. They also had to clean up other refuse. This employee was and is very well treated and his work was acknowledged by everyone who worked at the museum.

  133. Whatadeebee*

    Many years ago I had a summer job at a golf course as a server. One day I came in and my manager asked me if I could do some cleanup outside the clubhouse from some rowdy patrons the night before. Turns out they had tipped over an outdoor ashtray onto the grass and my job was to pick all the little butts and cigarette fragments out of the grass. I did it. Without gloves. I left that job and have much better self-advocacy skills now.

  134. KayDeeAye*

    This is not anywhere in the class of the some of the nominations, but it’s kind of funny, now that it’s over, so here goes.

    I work for a statewide non-profit membership organization, mostly as a writer/editor, but I also do a lot of photography. Although the organization is statewide, there are affiliates in each county. And there are 92 counties in this state, an important factoid to keep in mind.

    A few years ago, we were implementing a new recognition program for the county organizations, and in that first year, the bar for “winning” was, shall we say, quite low. Something like 87 out of the 92 counties “won.”

    My former boss had gotten active in his county’s affiliate after retiring, and his county was of course one of the winners. He suggested in all seriousness that alllllllllll 87 county presidents should troop across stage during the (already lengthy) awards program to receive their quasi-award directly from the hands of the state president, and he further suggested that I, personally, should shoot individual photos of allllllllll 87 county presidents as they received this quasi-award directly from the hands of the state president.

    “It would be very meaningful,” he said. Nah, I don’t think so. But in a way, it would have been very memorable, since the audience would have died of boredom, most of those 87 county presidents also would have died of boredom, the state president would have carpal tunnel syndrome after shaking all those hands, and I personally would have lost all my hair and most of my sanity.

    The great news is that he was my former boss, so I could tell him very politely to kiss my A**. But the incident did send a cold chill down my spine, because I couldn’t help but consider that he had been my boss just a few years earlier, and back then, he absolutely would have expected me to do it. Because a meaningless award is meaningful, I guess?

  135. Cute Li'l UFO*

    Graphic Designer at a small extremely dysfunctional tech company. I was the only woman after HR abruptly up and quit and working there was death by a thousand cuts. I signed over December’s pay because the CEO and CFO alleged that I’d been “overpaid” because it had been a slow month and thus got paid to sit around, apparently. For everyone that has a great smart idea of what *they* would do in that situation, I did too. It was like getting punched in the back of the head and dragged into a corner.

    I worked with someone in that office who had a reputation for a booming voice at conversation level and leaving elaborate dish sculptures in the sink. There was a dishwasher but it didn’t always get unloaded. Naturally, hand-washing Filthy’s dishes was often asked of me. I said no. I didn’t have a problem grabbing a plate or some silverware and scrubbing it off with mine if I happened to be washing something, but it was curious how it always fell to me.

    I knew I was gone when the CEO had me in the office late to go over a recent mockup my awesome coworker and I had done. CEO was livid that the site had not been coded–something I made very explicitly clear that I did not do when I was hired and knew in the back of my head that he would make it a big problem. He pounded on the desk and screamed “I need you to OWN IT!!” at me as I tried to explain I’d be happy to attempt to code the site but I was not like the previous designer and it would be very basic html and not a smart use of time, but after a few more “I need you to OWN IT!!” explosions I said “Ok fine fine I’ll OWN IT.”
    My PM, who’d been remote and was now on site for this, only added afterwards “You took that really well.”

    I got pushed out of the office not long after. CEO made a point of never being alone in a room with me, I got pushed to work from home (haha, what work?!), and my awesome coworker and I started volleying “OWN IT!!” back and forth over the cube. I got out before I could have a live run-in with a coworker from England who constantly called me afraid that I’d missed a detail and would explain at length what I needed to have and understand, never mind that I’m in California. I stopped answering after a couple of those and he was very unhappy that I told him to send an email.

    I was determined to squeeze out anything I could bill for afterwards and found a job a week or two later.

    1. Ismonie*

      Depending on the time frame, you may still be able to go after then for wage theft. So sorry you went through that.

  136. imbel*

    When I was unemployed in my early 20s, I did an unpaid internship at a fashion company where a friend was the office manager. She told me that she might be able to eventually get me on the payroll. But after we had to use takeout napkins as toilet paper because there was only enough real toilet paper to stock the (gold-tiled) bathroom exclusively for the use of the boss and his wife, I figured there was no chance of getting any money from them. We were coming up on Christmas, so I told them I wouldn’t be back after the holidays.

  137. Cremedelagremlin*

    I once worked as a receptionist for a physical therapist whose sessions were longer/more expensive than what most people’s insurance would cover. He regularly had me create backdated invoices for a 2nd fake visit so people could get more insurance $$ for their single visit. I would then have to change all the invoice numbers of invoices that came after that…100% illegal.

    Not me, but in another job, at a Highly Toxic Workplace, the boss used to cycle through employees with whom he was having issues (the typical accusation was that we were trying to sabotage his business in some way). One time a colleague came out of his office after a meeting about “her performance” (aka, she was the scapegoat of the week) looking bemused – it seems he had suggested they go to therapy together to “work out their issues”…

  138. De Minimis*

    I used to temp at a real estate development company as an accounting clerk, they had a state tax auditor come in once and my boss told me “if he asks to see such and such, give him these files, but not these files…” Thankfully I don’t think the auditor asked me for anything. I didn’t work with the info in any of the files, so I guess I would have been okay even if I’d ended up doing what my boss said since I don’t know for sure that they were hiding anything, but it sure seemed like they were.

  139. Anononon*

    Worked for an audit firm that made only its admin/operations staff come into the office in June and July 2020, in case “any accountants needed anything”. The timing should clue you into why that was an unreasonable request. When both accountants and the ops staff pushed back, not wanting COVID, suddenly “accountancy is an essential business”… but none of the accountants were being made to come in! This on top of the fact that they were blatantly lying about the office’s cleanliness (it was a sty that wasn’t being given janitor attention, because the janitors were being told to stay home – AS THEY SHOULD) and were forcing people with preexisting conditions to come in. They didn’t relent until someone threatened to report them to local health authorities.

    I left the entire industry as soon as I could, but I’m waiting for that company to get hit with all the karma life can muster.

  140. Bex*

    My department of 3 people had a department meeting scheduled, and it was pretty important we all meet due to some big projects with approaching deadlines. My coworker asked if we could move it to X day at Y time because she had missed a piano lesson, and the only time her teacher could reschedule for was the time of our meeting. I stated that her new suggested time for the meeting would not work for me, as I was taking my fiance to the neurologist then for the first follow-up appointment after a trip to the ER for a seizure (a potentially big, and definitely scary, medical event that happened to him but which, as the conscious person in the room at the time, I was in many ways better able to answer questions about).

    My boss asked if someone else could drive my fiance to the doctor.

    1. Shiba Dad*

      A similar thing happened at my old job to a coworker. The owner scheduled a meeting and a coworker told the owner he couldn’t attend because he had to take his wife to a doctor’s appointment. The owner said “She can call an ambulance to take her there.”

  141. A long time ago*

    I don’t know whether that counts as unreasonable, but it was terribly sad and I definitely felt entirely out of my depth.

    I was 17, and interning abroad, in my country’s embassy. The capital of this country was near the sea, a very unpredictable sea. One of our countrymen decided to go swimming, and nearly died. He was saved by a refugee from a third country, who died during the rescue.

    Our ambassador decided that it would be a good experience for me to accompany him to visit his widow. She was my age, and in mourning, and she had to receive in her very small flat an ambassador in full regalia, a priest that the ambassador had decided to bring, and the intern who had been doing social media and the envelopes for the last month. It was deeply uncomfortable and sad. The ambassador then decided, probably as a show of support, that we would be doing a common prayer, all of us holding hands. Mind you, we are a very secular country and she did not ask for any prayer. I felt so out of place.

    I imagine he wanted to share the realities of his job.

  142. Cynthia*

    Not unreasonable per se, but annoying for sure. Early in my career, when I was a receptionist, the Old School Boss (think “Mad Men” mentality – suits every day and I was one of “the office girls”) would walk from his desk, down the hall past the coffee machine, and over to my desk to ask me to make a pot of coffee. Then he would walk back down the hall, past the coffee machine AGAIN, and back to his desk. It would have been faster for him to make the coffee – that only *he* drank, by the way – than to walk all the way down to my desk. But that was a job for “the office girls”, I guess. 20 years later and I still roll my eyes when I think about it.

    1. Mazey's Mom*

      Reminds me of the time when I was working for a temp agency, and they wanted to place me with a foreign colonel working at the air force base. Part of my duties would be to make him coffee because he comes from a culture where women are subservient and this is expected of them. The recruiter apologized to me for even asking. I declined the assignment.

  143. How about we don't break the law...*

    Add a box for “race” on a job application specifically so we could screen applicants by their race. I refused and Boss backed down.

  144. Friendly Neighborhood Researcher*

    I used to work in alumni relations at a large private university, and at one point we received a massive gift from someone who was known to be a bit… let’s say “challenging,” so as part of stewarding the gift our school arranged a concert by a rock band that the donors really liked. However, the concert was scheduled on a date about a week before students arrived for the fall semester, and the band’s major hit song was released before most of the incoming freshmen had been born, so to make it look like there was an audience, everyone on the alumni relations team was required to go to this concert that started around 9pm on a weeknight in an area of the city that had limited public transit options at night. And I’m not exaggerating when I say “required”: my coworker only managed to get out of it by getting a note from their doctor.

    So here’s how it went down: everyone had to work their full day of 9-5, then wait around for four hours (most of us went to the on-campus bar and drank heavily), then go to a concert where we spent two agonizing hours being insulted by the lead singer (who appeared to be under the impression that we were a) students and b) absolutely dying to see this band), then find our way home at 11pm, and then show up for work at our usual time the next morning. No acknowledgement that this was an inconvenience for us, no additional compensation or time off (almost all of us were salaried), and the only “perk” was that they comped our rideshares.

    A year or so later, the donors retracted the gift.

  145. Campfire Raccoon*

    While temping through a well-known accounting recruiting/temp firm, I had the CFO pressure me DAILY to “quit” the temp firm, take two weeks off, and then come work for the company I was temping at – all so he could avoid having to pay the finder’s fee to the temp company. I said no: I’d been working with the temp firm on and off my entire career and wasn’t about to commit that particular sin. Especially since the temp firm billed pre-billed the “finder’s fee” through my weekly paychecks. I’d already been temping at this company for months! The CFO wanted me to commit industry suicide so he could save less than $1200.

    1. lailaaaaah*

      I had something similar, but in reverse- when I worked in recruitment, one of our clients said they didn’t want to work with the nursery teacher they’d been gushing over for weeks any more, and also they didn’t want to work with us, they’d found someone else, thank you and goodbye.

      Lo and behold, I checked the nursery teacher’s LinkedIn page and she announced she’d just got a permanent offer from… exactly that nursery. It’s like they didn’t think we’d find out, or that they hadn’t read the part of their contract that said that any effort to do exactly what they did would mean they paid the finder’s fee + 50% on top.

  146. NotYourPT*

    I work as a physical therapist with children with disabilities. I had one supervisor tell me I should subscribe to a professional journal on my own dime ($800) and then give all of the other therapists access. Nope!

    Or, the time a family wanted a specialized chair that my program won’t buy (for good reason) so the supervisor told me to make the child one. Out of cardboard!

    Or the time the therapy staff was required to bring in lunch for the staff of a nearby school staff to make friends. On our own dime.

  147. PT*

    One time I was at work and there was a fire in a trashcan in the park next to our driveway, and I saw one of my coworkers trying to put it out with a nalgene (like, dumping a nalgene on the fire, running back inside, filling the nalgene, running back outside, dumping it on the fire…this was not effective) so I rousted up a wheelie mop bucket and filled it with water and rushed it over.

    Another time I had to do a low-key manhunt to bust a perv who’d been harassing the staff when they were working alone and it was slow.

    I’ve had to do bird rescue a few times, for birds that got into the building via propped open doors or windows without screens. I’ve also been shocked at the number of my coworkers who think this is a waste of time and will just let the poor birds die.

  148. Phil*

    Back when I was low man on the totem pole in a recording studio my boss had me drive his cars to be washed, to the shop, etc. I think it’s unreasonable to expect your employees to drive your Mercedes 300SEL 6.3 and Ferrari 365GTC/4 around town. Really.

    2. lailaaaaah*

      My favourite landlord story is the time our landlady refused to fix our very visibly broken windows for almost a year, citing a lack of money on her part. During that year she not only upped my rent 10%, her husband also used OUR garage to store his Ferrari, which he would take out several times a week in summer and spend hours hand-washing it while we watched through our broken windows.

  149. Toxic Avenger*

    My boss once asked me to go ask coworker who is Southeast Asian how to pronounce a name. Nevermind the fact that Asia is a giant continent and the name in question was of a different language/ethnicity/country/time zone from our coworker.

    I’ve got hostile stories for daaaaaays.

  150. former Hill staffer*

    As a young staffer on the Hill, an aide asked me to get a copy of an appropriations report from someone with pinkeye. I declined. I suspect an intern did it, but if it was so important to the aide, maybe it was worth doing personally.

  151. maples*

    I worked for an NFP and part of my role involved managing inventory for promotional materials (posters, brochures, etc). I needed to reorder a new stock and my boss was adamant I should order a huge amount of stuff because we had a funding deadline coming up and “had to use that money”. So, at their insistence, I ordered 5x the amount they normally got. Leading up to the delivery, I asked my boss, our department head AND the office manager what to do when it arrives and how we would get all this stuff up to our 5th floor storage area? I had never had to deal with this before and just assumed they either had an understanding with the delivery people to bring it up and store it, or hired some kind of movers. Every answer was a brush off/“don’t worry about it”, until the day before when I told my boss I was really worried about it and she said “don’t worry we’ll all pitch in”.

    You can see where this is going, but sure enough, when the 10+ pallets of hundreds of boxes of thick paper weighing 50lbs each arrived, everyone was “busy” and the office manager gave me a dolly and said good luck. I spent the entire 9-5PM day lugging boxes from the loading dock to the lobby, onto the elevator and into the storage closet, all while the building security chastised me for leaving things on the loading dock.

    I know this is the kind of physical labour a lot of people do day in and day out, so it’s not THAT big a deal, but I can’t believe the office manager looked at a 22 year old in business casual attire and said “yup, no safety risks here to have you lift hundreds of pounds for 8 hours by yourself, have at it.” I called in sick the next day because everything hurt. Now I’d just walk out and never come back.

  152. Norma*

    Same horrible employer:
    1. I had to do door to door canvassing for their personal political cause on the weekends.
    2. I had an 104 degree fever and had just come from the doctor facing possible lymph node removal for a raging infection. I still delivered the pie they had ordered to the weekend charity function. On Monday, they got angry I did not stay for the three hour picnic.
    3. Shortly before I finally quit, I had to keep a spreadsheet of my day in 6 minute increments. This included bathroom breaks. I would have to review it every evening with my boss.

  153. Vikki*

    I had to leave work to babysit my boss’s kids (without pay) so he and his wife could testify in a custody hearing. He threatened to fire me if I didn’t and given the culture at the time, he could have.

  154. Dotty*

    Hand-craft 250 pairs of snowshoes for teddy bears, while sitting in the parking lot. My actual job was delivery driver.

      1. Dotty*

        I was the local delivery driver for a small retail teddy bear store that had a home delivery service. The teddy bear factory was in another state. The company president took a special international order for thousands of bears with snowshoes, without checking with the bear factory as to whether they had a source for bear snowshoes or whether they had the time or capability to make snowshoes. On all counts they did not. So he experimented with soaking some bendy wood in his bathtub, wrote up some instructions on how to copy his home-made prototype, and assigned a quota to every employee in all the retail stores. Our store was so tiny that there was absolutely no workspace, so we took turns sitting in a lawn chair in the parking lot with a tub of warm water, soaking, bending, drilling holes in, and weaving bendy wood.

  155. Mary*

    My boss at my first white-collar job (in-house law clerk) told me to take off at 3pm on Friday and I could tell she was feeling very noblesse oblige about the whole thing. The next Friday after timesheets were due, she came into my office and told me that I didn’t work very many hours the previous week (still over 40) and I needed to work more. After pointing out that she told me to go home, she said “Well, you can leave early on a Friday but you should make up the hours.” That Friday I left “early” and decided to do some work on Saturday and Sunday. The next week I got a lecture about work-life balance and how I shouldn’t be working on the weekends, yet I should be working 50+ hours during the week.

  156. Princess Leia's Left Hand Bun*

    File a small claims court case on a client because my boss, the owner, neglected to agree a new price with them on-site when a job turned out to be far bigger than anticipated.

    They had instead dealt with and agreed a price with *the client’s client*, therefore cutting /our/ client out completely.

    It was apparently my fault as I wrote a landline contact number down on the contact form and no-one uses them anymore. 0_0

    It was absolute mess, and all sane suggestions
    were ignored so I accidentally delayed the paperwork until I could quit.

  157. Dipper Pines*

    I wish the LW that was made to leave a note at the grave site would give one more update. The last update was from 2017 and she had not found permanent employment. I really want her to have a good job and be thriving now.

  158. CR*

    Not an office job, but I worked as a nanny for a rich power couple and one year I had to sign all their Christmas cards for them. I have many stories from that job!

    1. Green Goose*

      Ohh, I’m so curious! How much time did they spend with their kids? Did you have to be on-call at night when the kids might wake up?

      1. CR*

        I wasn’t live-in, thankfully, although I may as well have been because I worked overtime almost every day and many evenings and weekends as well. Depending on the day the parents didn’t see the kids during the work week at all (leaving before they woke up and getting home after I put the kids to bed). I regularly worked 12 hour days. I don’t know how I did it in retrospect but I was young!

  159. Raclette 57*

    I once worked at an office that was out of the boss’s (former) summer lake house. The driveway from the street going to the house was downhill, long, and dangerously steep. If the brakes on your car failed, you would end up in the lake. During the winter, they were too cheap to have the driveway sanded or plowed. Taking the car down that thing was out of the question with all of the snow and ice. So we had to park on the side of the road and since I didn’t own a pair of skis, I’d gather my purse, lunch, etc. Squat down and hug my knees tight. Launch myself down the driveway. Skid down that driveway in my shoes. Pray I didn’t kill myself in the process. And then in the evening, in the dark, we had to pick and crawl our way back up that driveway to be able to go home. Every. Single. Day. And this was supposed to be a dignified office job.

  160. Manufactured Anon*

    Guy on phone from shipping: Hey, the computer won’t let me ship this item, it says (quality status code).
    Me: Let me take a look… yeah, it’s waiting on a test that hasn’t been run yet.
    Guy: Can you just make it so it passes?
    Me: …no?

    1. Manufactured Anon*

      For a little more context, I was one of the system developers so I definitely could have forced the system to let it pass if I felt like committing fraud in order to let them ship it a few hours before the tests would be completed.

  161. Lilly76*

    It’s a toss up between not being allowed to use white out or sticky labels to reuse file folders (even if I bought it myself) and instead having to use ups shipping labels cut up (because they were free) but because they didn’t adhere well because they are made to stick to cardboard I would have to tape them on. And I had to cut the scotch tape strip in half longway to make it thinner to “not waste tape”.

    Same boss/owner ~decided to do a “side job” of installing inside and outside whole house sound system at someone’s house and took me to the site and told me to figure out how and do it.

    We were a wholesale soft and sporting goods company.

    I was the office manager

  162. A Feast of Fools*

    Find creative ways to write my boss’s expense reports so the company would reimburse him for the cash he spent on strippers and prostitutes.

    Same boss wanted me to spend several hours a day walking through our offices and pause around corners to see if I could overhear anyone saying bad things about him.

    I lasted six months before bailing for a sane job.

  163. Katie*

    This wasn’t me- it was someone I know. She was a lifeguard, I think at a fancy country club, and there was thunder so she had to tell everyone to get out of the pool for however long they were supposed to clear the pool after hearing thunder. This woman came up to her and asked if she could just move it along, speed up the pool reopening. She was like, “…are you asking me to control the weather?”

  164. BeepBeep*

    This one is more funny and I’ll conceived than strictly unreasonable.

    When I was a teenager (like 14/15) I worked for my town’s tourism department. We would put on festivals throughout the year, so some weekends I’d be asked to help with set up, putout traffic cones, checking in vendors, putting up signage etc.

    My boss takes me and another employee and says that she needs help getting some stuff from up at the police station, which is up a pretty massive hill from the festival location, but definitely walkable. So we walk up the hill and it turns out what my boss needed was golf carts. She and the other employee each get in one and speed off, leaving me to take the remaining golf cart.

    But I was 15. I had absolutely no idea how to drive. Like at all. I’d never even driven a bumper car.

    So I’m basically loitering around a police garage trying to figure out how the hell I’m supposed to work this thing, when a very friendly officer came out (I’m assuming because she was trying to figure out what the hell a teenage girl was doing by all the police cars) and eventually helps me get out of the garage.

    And into actual street traffic. The other drivers did not love being a part of my first attempt to operate a motor vehicle.

    Eventually I get myself out and on to the closed down street at which point my boss comes flying up the hill in her golf cart (which was actually fairly impressive given how little power they had) with an absolutely panicked look on her face. Apparently she and the other employee had gotten back to the festival and then wondered what was taking me so long. It took them about 15 minutes to come to the realization that I was 15 and wasn’t even eligible for a learners permit, and probably had no idea what I was doing. She drove down with me the rest of the way, yelling “BRAKE” a lot at the end.

    After that I was no longer asked to obtain golf carts for future festivals.

    1. learnedthehardway*

      Laughed out loud at this one – from the police officer helping you drive under-age to the manager yelling driving directions – truly funny.

    2. Aspiring Chicken Lady*

      I was babysitting for my neighbors, who happened to be relatives of a particularly historical rich family, and was brought to one of the estates while they were at a Cousins Meeting. They suggested I take the 2 and 4 year old for a drive around the golf course we were on. I said sure, because, I mean, what else would I say?

      So I popped the preschoolers into the back seat of the golf cart, which has no seatbelts and no doors, and attempted for the very first time to operate a motorized vehicle, in reverse. Amazingly no one tumbled out, and after a short spin around the paths, I gratefully parked and got back onto solid ground.

      (On the way home the next day, in the family 6-seater plane, we flew through a thunderstorm and probably came substantially closer to dying than anyone ever wanted to admit. But that’s another story.)

  165. Rosy C*

    I worked for a small restaurant group owned by a husband-wife couple. The husband was the chef and the wife was head of operations. She was not good at her job, super flaky, always late for everything, and had a tendency to gaslight and manipulate her employees—she could make you feel like her best friend, and if you didn’t do what she asked, she would be vindictive and passive aggressive. It was such a rough experience that ended with an abusive situation for me, so when I met “Jane,” who had my job before me, we made fast friends and shared all our war stories in solidarity. She told me that she once met our former boss at her house for a meeting and then planned to go to the office together with boss’ 18-month-old-son in tow. But boss had forgotten the car seat in their other car, so she asked Jane to hold her son in her lap in the backseat while boss drove them 5 miles from their house to the restaurant ‍♀️ . My friend felt like she couldn’t say no, but she still regrets it to this day.

  166. CaviaPorcellus*

    I was told to finish out my shift after being fired.

    I was 15, so I did it. When my dad came to pick me up, he was livid. Lesson learned! I’m done when the employer says they’re done. (I haven’t been fired since, so I haven’t been able to put this into practice, but it’s a good lesson all the same.)

    3 years later, I was working at a fast food place over the summer before going off to college. One of my coworkers came in, distraught about his girlfriend breaking up with him. The manager tossed him her car keys, looked at me, and said “go hot box* with this guy. Cheer him up.”
    (For those unfamiliar with the terminology – she was ordering me to go smoke marijuana with this man, in her car, with the windows up so the smoke filled up the space. That was an official order from my manager. And I think she was also telling me to be a rebound hook up? But I did not comply with that part of it.)

  167. WomensRea*

    One time I was an intern in DC for the summer. We had a speaker coming to the inside of the Capitol Visitor Center – they have a very, very strict zero liquids policy for parts of the building. I arrived inside of the building and got word that one of our panelists was running late. I met her outside with my manager. Turns out she had liquid perfume samples in her bag, which she didn’t want to toss so she had to leave her entire bag outside. And of course she couldn’t leave a bad unattended on Capitol grounds. So my manager asked me to sit with the bag outside for 2.5 hours. And I did. I sat on the grass for 2.5 hours in front of Capitol hill with this woman’s bag until she was done with the event. The weather was very nice for DC summer but it felt fairly degrading. And of course the internship was unpaid!

  168. Buni*

    I had a boss who’s thing was ‘Never tell me No’, but in a….slightly not-unreasonable way? He once said “If I ask you to do something, and the answer’s ‘Yes, but I’d have to build a time machine’, then come and tell me that. Not ‘no'”.

    It was strangely liberating – I definitely remember questions like “Can I be in Dubai to guest lecture in 2 days time?” “Yes, but it will cost you £9000.”, and “Can we have these documents?” “Yes, if you work out how to un-burn paper.” He was fine with that, just not ‘no’.

    1. Anony*

      Your boss sounds hilarious and unreasonable, and I would have had so much fun with this. “Can you get this document for me?” “Yes but I’d have to hack into the Pentagon.” “Can you delete this from social media?” “Yes but I’d have to build a Time Machine, destroy the internet, and keep anyone from ever inventing it again.”

    3. Vanilla Bean*

      I had a boss once who would do this instead of saying no to anyone, ever, and expect them to infer from the context that the answer was actually no. Except he didn’t have the best sense of what his audience would and would not do, and some of the barriers he raised were outside their technical understanding so they’d assume they were minor problems to overcome, so we repeatedly wound up with misunderstandings where someone thought something was going to happen when it definitely wasn’t. It was greeeeaaaat. (I still work with him, we’re peers now, and he has gotten much better, thankfully. I nearly strangled him back then.)

  170. TheyThemTheirs*

    I thought of another one!!! I experienced harassment for a summer and a half by a kid in a summer camp. When I complained to my direct manager, she would say, “You have to understand. He has a rough childhood.” The harassment was sexual-level and religious harassment – stuff I’d absolutely have shut down now as an adult.

    The second summer I came back they told me the kid had been bullying me because I smelled. (!!!) I’m not making this up – the director of the camp said this. The director of the camp also went on to say that we were expected to get along.

    Finally it all came to a head when I told him to shut up and he punched a hole in the wall. (I got in trouble with it) I told someone else working in camp who saw the gigantic red flags. They took me to the director and stood there so she couldn’t ignore it. He was fired several days later, but that didn’t stop the director from sobbing into her soup bowl the day he left because “HE HAD A BAD CHILDHOOD.”

    So I guess the most unreasonable thing would be to endure sexual harassment because someone had a bad childhood.

    Don’t worry. The camp got shut down later when someone got HIV from a camper, and would be worth several e-mails to AAM all on its own…

    2. The Smiling Pug*

      This sounds horrifying. These are yet more reasons why I’m so glad I never worked at summer camps through high school and college.

    3. NACSACJACK*

      Wait a minute, What?!? Got HIV from a camper? That is a story to be told. Unless they were having you*know*what or accidently stabbed with a needle, it’s virtually impossible to get HIV casually. We need to hear about this.

      1. Theythemtheirs*

        To my knowledge they were stabbed with a needle by a diabetic Camper – it was a special needs camp

  171. broken foot*

    I broke my foot at a work event in front of many coworkers. Came into work the next day on crutches. My boss messaged me on Slack to meet her in the furthest conference room from my desk, and when I had crutched my way there, she said that my broken foot was making people uncomfortable and that I should go home.

    So I took a 5 day weekend and gave my two weeks when I got back in the office.

    1. TheyThemTheirs*

      Yeah that’s absolutely not okay. You make accommodations for someone at that point. I bet AAM would be furious – I remember Allison saying she broke her foot a couple years back.

  172. Dust Bunny*

    I think the worst . . . it wasn’t one thing but a whole situation, was when a friend of mine and I were working for a summer camp that had a “horse program”. Only it didn’t–it had a guy who bought horses at auction and then brought the camp literally any of them that didn’t try to kill him as he loaded them into the trailer. We had ancient horses, stove-up horses, pregnant horses, horses that had clearly been ridden numb and then dumped, and a stunningly beautiful Tennessee Walker mare who had probably never worn a saddle and bridle in her life.

    We were supposed to take 8- to 15-year-olds on trail rides.

    We test-rode all of them. A big white pony who was an ace in the arena spooked and dragged me through some blackberry brambles. A probably-Quarter Horse (muscular and fast) panicked during a mild thunderstorm and took off down a steep, narrow trail lined with broken tree stumps before I could turn his head around to stop him without worrying about him falling and getting us both impaled. It’s a bloody miracle nobody died.

    The job lasted about two months and we were constantly juggling schedules to match horses’ temperaments and proclivities with kids’ physical strength and willingness not to be too intimidated. The camp kept waffling: They wanted to say they had a horse program but had no interest in putting in the work they needed to do to actually have a horse program. A horse program is not something you do half-way–you either do it or you don’t.

    Finally, a woman’s organization that supported the camp came for a jovial site visit and my friend/supervisor cornered a bunch of them and explained what was going on. Two of the horses got in a spat over something during this discussion, which was perfect timing. We basically got paid off and sent home early, and the shady horse dealer was told to come get his animals. The whole situation sucked.

    4. Artemesia*

      a horse in an apparently competently run day camp my son went to killed a kid; this was a camp that did what you were supposed to do and still a ten year old kid managed to get kicked in the head and died. This is insane.

      1. The Dogman*

        That sort of incident can happen to anyone around most horses. Even careful people can be killed, horses kicks are so powerful it is hard to believe until you see it in person.

        I saw a Shire Horse (huge horses, over 1.5 metric tons sometimes) kick a landrover over with one kick. The whole drivers door was smashed in, the frames were bent and the horse was uninjured.

        Another horse, a small pony, kicked me once and I was already jumping back when it connected. I had six fractured ribs and the bruising took over a month to subside!

    5. Barn manager*

      OMG I worked for a similar camp. It was awful knowing we had all these horses that we couldn’t use with the kids, but not being able to do anything about it because if they were taken away to make room for a more appropriate horse, well, you know…

  173. alien visitors*

    I had to stay overnight in a creepy house regularly “visited by grey aliens” to watch my supervisor’s pets as an undergrad.

    My supervisor was going out of town for the weekend, and asked if I could stay overnight at her house and care for her pets. I now realize that such a thing isn’t appropriate to ask of your student employee, but I wasn’t aware of AAM back then and didn’t have much ability to enforce boundaries or say no to a supervisor, especially that one who regularly got way too personal at work.

    The pets were great, but immediately I got a bad feeling inside the house due to some of the design choices. I remember taping a piece of printer paper over artwork in the main area depicting a screaming, bleeding woman with blacked-out eyes. Quickly realizing that the wifi password wasn’t written in the pet care notes, I texted my supervisor to ask about it. She directed me to look inside a notebook in her office (also full of interesting design choices). Flipping through the pages looking for the password, I see multiple drawings of her in her bed with aliens standing over it, along with written accounts of their many visits and tests performed in the spaceship.

    Obviously, I didn’t sleep at all that night and probably pissed off her tiny dog by following it around in hopes it could protect me from any aliens. Luckily, the aliens didn’t visit that night and I got a new work assignment the next school year.

  174. hello*

    I had a grand boss who was very penny conscious despite the bottom line being quite profitable. We were converting mountains and mountains of files over to an electronic format. All the files had been confirmed and could be sent to the shredder. In order to save $500 so the shredding company didn’t have to do it, we were required to take 2 months of time, here and there, removing staples and SAVING paper clips. Ugh.

  175. anon for this*

    I’ve told this story here before, but I am in a line of work where people travel a lot and share hotel rooms (think nonprofits). Right out of college years ago, I was sent on a trip to East Coast City with a bunch of other people from work. I did not know that it was unreasonable for my boss to assume that of course I, the 22-year-old woman, would share a room AND A BED with a man 13 years older. I was entry-level and drowning in student debt, so at the time I felt a little weird about it but decided to hope that nothing untoward would happen.

    Absolutely nothing untoward happened. Thank heavens the 35-year-old man in question was a decent human being and didn’t even hint at trying anything nonplatonic with the clueless new hire. I also enjoyed East Coast City, where I’d never been.

    But the combination of that and the boss’s wildly distorted expectations in other ways accumulated. She hated the administrative team and thought so little of them that she kept getting mad at us for following completely normal official protocols. I also caught her gossiping about me contemptuously behind my back for listening to the admins, and it was so childish that I simply couldn’t take her seriously after that. About four months in, I quit, broke my lease, and moved back to my hometown to start over.

  176. LunaLena*

    Not me, but happened to a co-worker. My co-worker was the person who took orders for a small company that made promotional products. One customer mailed in a typewritten order (this was in 2011 or thereabouts), and phoned shortly afterwards to make sure she got it. This was unusual but not unreasonable. After confirming she had his order, though, he asked her if he could dictate an email to her and have her send it to another customer for him. Because, as he proudly told her, he didn’t “do computers,” had never owned one, and didn’t plan to ever get one. He also wanted her to somehow hide her email address (since it clearly was the name of our company) and pretend she was his secretary so the customer wouldn’t know he hadn’t sent the email himself. My co-worker said no.

    This company was a alcohol-related business, so we also had to keep the outside door locked because we occasionally had people wander in demanding free booze. One even called multiple times and threatened to plant a bomb.

    Completely unrelated, but the first story Allison gave as an example reminded me of my first full-time job, working customer service at a branch of a large corporation near Los Angeles. Our service area included a lot of rich and glamorous areas like Bel Air and Beverly Hills, so we had many celebrity clients (I had to look up a certain former Beatle’s address at one point, for example), and there were plenty of people who thought that we should go out of their way for them. I remember one lady called in specifically to request we re-schedule an entire route because she didn’t want the service man coming before 11 a.m., because the maid didn’t come in before then and she didn’t want to get out of bed to let him in herself (she had a fit when the dispatcher said no). Another failed to answer the door because she assumed it was a solicitor, and after realizing who it was, called to demand that he turn around and come back because she needed service NOW. When the dispatcher said they couldn’t do that because he had a schedule to keep, she basically said screw those other people, her husband is an IMPORTANT PRODUCER, and they had to come back to her house NOW (again the answer was no). Hearing the phrase “do you know who I/my spouse am/is” was not uncommon at that job. Prior to that, I didn’t realize it was a thing people actually said in real life. I thought they only said it in fiction.

    The funny thing is, most of people who said stuff like that were no one in particular. The actually famous ones (including a certain celebrity who recently went into space) were quite nice and polite, and the service guys usually had nothing but good things to say about them.

    1. LunaLena*

      I also had one terrible boss who, after I announced I was quitting (the place was a start-up and was abusive, toxic, committing absolutely illegal practices, and on top of all that refused to pay me), threatened to sue me for “stealing his intellectual property.” By this he meant the company logo, which he had given to me since he hired me for a graphic design role, and which I had on my personal laptop because the computer he provided was completely inadequate for what he wanted. Literally the first words out of his mouth when I said I was quitting were “I’m going to sue you.”

  177. Green Goose*

    Ohhh, I have one! Years ago I was working in South Korea as an English teacher and one of the standard benefits was that the employer paid 50% of health insurance and costs. This was fine at my first job, but at my second job the owner was kind of shady and very cheap. She said that she wouldn’t pay my insurance but if anything “came up” she would cover 50% of whatever the costs were.

    Well about six months into my contract I got an allergic reaction and my whole face swelled up, I said I needed to go to the doctor and she started making excuses about waiting, then it happened two more times. Each time my face would swell. I sent her a picture of my face and said we needed to go to the doctor that day, and she never responded. So on the Monday I went in (swelling went down with ibuprofen but still) and she called me into her office to tell me about her great idea. Instead of going to an allergist, she wanted me to test myself by eating the same things I had eaten when I had the allergic reaction and see if it happened again. She was completely serious. I said no.

  178. Murphy*

    I had to wrangle a bunch of escaped chickens in the parking lot…who then immediately re-escaped out of a hole in the fence and had to be chased down again, and the hole repaired.

    Was it an animal facility? Yes. Did that facility include chickens? No, it did not.

    It was an animal rescue (dogs, cats, bunnies). There was a small garden that some of the employees worked on in their off-time. They also rescued four chickens, who I had discovered on walkabout in the parking lot when I was leaving at the end of a shift. Thankfully we were closed and the parking lot was virtually empty. The chickens were safely returned and the hole in the fence was repaired.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        Somebody who lived behind a laboratory where I used to work had chickens and they would get out sometimes. I’d see them on the gravel roadway that functioned as an alley of sorts behind the houses. Since I had experience with chickens (raising them with my ex), if I saw one loose, I’d chase them down and pop them back over the fence.

        It stopped happening after a while so I assume they fixed it so they couldn’t get out again. I’d forgotten all about that, but your post reminded me.

        1. Artemesia*

          years ago I was sitting in my mother’s living room in BellevueWashington and because it was warm we had the front door open; a huge chicken just strolled in and walked around the house. This was not farm country and it was before keeping backyard chickens became the rage it is now — like 30 years ago. No idea where it came from but it was enjoying itself.

  179. Not A YouTuber*

    I worked as a program coordinator at a non-profit that provided a tutoring service. My job was to support tutors and students – facilitating pairings, providing curriculum/materials, dealing with disciplinary issues, etc. Our director and my boss wanted to partner with another area non-profit, and so they promised them that they could provide 6 hour-long educational videos that kids attending this other non-profit could follow along with when they had downtime. They directed me and my colleague to produce these videos. Bear in mind, we had full 40-hour/week jobs, but they wanted us to squeeze in designing, creating, and producing 3 hours apiece of educational videos into our existing roles. We were not provided equipment other than our work laptops, Prezi, and a Zoom account. We did our best, and were immediately told that the production value was too low and they couldn’t give this to the partner org. We were given a document outlining what we should do when we REDO these videos, including storyboarding, writing a word-for-word script (again, 1 person talking into a camera for 1 hour), using a teleprompter, setting up lighting and an “at-home studio” (we were all working from home as this was during the pandemic – our program was temporarily virtual), and “wearing makeup” – our boss (50sM) even offered to give us (25F and 24F) advice on that last one. They didn’t provide better cameras or lighting equipment. Again, they wanted us to do all this on top of our existing full-time responsibilities. We basically just both said they could either remove all of our other tasks for two weeks to allow us to focus on this AND purchase professional-grade equipment, or it wouldn’t be possible. They let it go.

    1. not a doctor*

      OMG, something like this happened at my deeply unstable startup… I’d forgotten until just now, and that job was only last year, which tells you just how many bizarre things happened there.

    2. Artemesia*

      To produce/design ordinary in person classroom instruction of any quality takes several house of prep per hour of delivery the first time you do it. To produce media that anyone will sit still and watch for hours requires probably quadruples that –IF you are already a competent designer AND have a competent videographer/graphics person. I have produced video for a project and contracted competent people to work with our scripts and it was still damn hard.

  180. RD*

    I worked at a market research company that was owned by one person. He was regularly sending me to Western Union to send money to prostitutes in Russia and Belarus, as well as their “handler”. He made an annual trip to Russia trying to find one to come back to the USA with him to marry him. Most of the time one would come back with him, but would always go back within a few weeks because he was impossible to live with. He spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to hook a wife but died alone like the miserable creep he was.

  181. Staying(In)Sane*

    I work in healthcare support services. I was ordered to go into the COVID units with zero training on how to don and use the PPE equipment. Yeah, that was fun. I’m not stupid, so I figured it out, but still…

  182. LookMaNoHands*

    Come back to work 5 days after an emergency c-section. Tiny company, no FMLA. Same place, while I was pregnant: “Of you HAVE to eat, you have to go do it in your car.” They didn’t like the aesthetic of a pregnant woman eating.

  183. Figgie*

    My spouse’s boss made us change the day of my father’s funeral. Even though she knew ahead of time the date we were planning on, she then okayed PTO for two other members of the department for that exact day and told my spouse that he had to work or change the date of the funeral. So, we had my father’s funeral on a Saturday, as my spouse was pretty sure she would make sure he couldn’t attend if it was on a work day.

    1. Database Developer Dude*

      Why in the world would a boss make it so you couldn’t attend your own father’s funeral? Was she that much of a psycho?

  184. HM MM*

    I had a boss ask who asked me to call FedEx to see if they could bend the laws of time/physics.

    Basically he just forgot how time zones work. We needed a hard copy of a legal doc, with a wet ink signature, for an early morning meeting in Tokyo the next day. Except he forgot how far ahead Tokyo is compared to East Coast US. So doc is supposed to be there for a 9am meeting on Thurs (Tokyo time). Boss comes to me on Wed at 2pm and hands me the doc and tells me to overnight it to Tokyo. I get it all prepped, let him know it will arrive by Fri, 8am (Tokyo time). He loses it and explains it needs to be there for the 9am Thurs meeting. I tried to explain that this was impossible at this point – Tokyo is 13 hrs ahead. So it’s 3am there now. Its like a 12 hr flight – so even if the doc was put on a plane within the next hour it still wouldn’t get there by 9am.

    Boss wouldn’t hear it. He told me to call FedEx to “see if there’s anything they can do”. At this point I realized I was working for a crazy person (ok really, he just absolutely refused to acknowledge, even to himself, that he had made a silly mistake). So I put my headset on and messed around on the computer, pretending I was on hold (I didn’t actually call them) and then told boss that, yes, I checked with FedEx and the absolute earliest they can get it there is… Fri at 8am.

  185. Cookies for Breakfast*

    Here’s the story of the most unreasonable thing I was never asked. I was interviewing for the office manager role at a small company, and during the interview, the boss explained part of the role would be acting as his assistant. He also said he wouldn’t expect his assistant to do personal favours, which I believed: I was young, naive, and in need of a job to pay the bills.

    At one point he asked whether I liked dogs. I answered truthfully: I like dogs, but had bad experiences with some, so I’m only comfortable if they are well behaved. The boss explained that he often brought his dog to the office, and brought the dog into the room. The interaction was just fine (the dog, although quite small, was in fact a huge liability – but that’s another story).

    Over the years (and several personal favours later, some of which would make fun comments here), I realised that he most likely asked because he was looking for someone to dogsit when he travelled. I know because, eventually, an employee who was much more senior than me started dogsitting for him. The boss took hierarchy seriously, and would never have saddled that person with the dog if there had been someone junior he could ask. The official story was that the other person loved the dog so much they offered to look after it, and I was surprised that they didn’t back out after the dog used the carpet at their home as a toilet. But nope. Social media posts show that, many years later, the arrangement still lasts. Probably unrelated, but…the dogsitting employee is now a director at the company.

  186. Jingle all the way*

    I was hired by an international company opening a new office in the US in 2010. Basically, the founder wanted to pretend he was running a US tech start up and take advantage of the labor laws in the US to spend a lot of money and be cool and hip. I was his first US hire, and I thought this would be be step forward into leading the company into the brave new US market. (I cringe at how naive I was, even after getting two graduate degrees.) The rest of the staff were actually employees at the European office who would rotate in and out of the US office, staying at the corporate apartment. I had to find the apartment, purchase all the furnishings for it from IKEA and assemble them. Once things were running, I found out I wasn’t just the Marketing Manager. I was also HR, customer service, basically anything that didn’t involve hard coding. I had to learn how to set up the process for cutting checks to suppliers, purchase our giveaway thank you gifts and mail them, answer the phones, etc. The excuse for all of this was that I was the only native English speaker in the office and that gave me some kind of magic power to work with vendors/banks/customers, despite the fact that my international colleagues all spoke fluent English. I even ended up learning how to file the corporate taxes!

    When I started making noises about being paid more, they decided to fire me, no reason given despite me asking. Which was fine, I wanted to quit anyway. The best part was a year later, I got an email from them asking for the password for the website used to pay the state taxes. I wrote back and said I could help them, but I’d be charging my standard consulting fee of $100/hr with a 2 hour minimum for the service. Never heard back. Good riddance.

  187. Moo*

    I was a junior member of staff (but I had a fairly extensive work history elsewhere) and a senior member of staff asked me to impersonate him to his own bank to find out why his credit card wouldn’t work for a transaction. I think I was booking flights for him and I had the relevant card numbers but not the card itself. I laughed – thinking it was a joke because of how absurd it was. Turns out he was serious, and when I (she/her) said I wouldn’t sound like him, he said if I said I was him they couldn’t question it based on voices…. however I pointed out to him that I also didn’t know the answers to questions they might ask me, like date of birth, address etc. Aside from it being, like, fraud. Just because he didn’t want to make a phone call himself!

    1. Cookies for Breakfast*

      I bet that my old boss, from my earlier comment to this post, would have acted just the same.

      He once was having issues with his car insurance. He was late renewing it and needed to get it done, or was having trouble with a claim, can’t remember. He asked me to call them to sort it out as a priority. It took me, like, five attempts to even get through to an operator that day. The operator then told me they could only speak with the policyholder. Having been told that the insurance issue was urgent, I trawled the whole office to find my boss and get him on the phone, only for him to get angry because it was my job to sort his stuff out (not his personal business, it wasn’t) and couldn’t I see that HE WAS BUSY?

      I thanked the operator and explained the policyholder couldn’t get to the phone. I hung up and got back to my work. My boss had to concede that dealing directly with the policyholder was not an unreasonable ask, and call the insurance company himself.

  188. Happy Elsewhere*

    When I was on faculty at a major research university, another professor in my department plagiarized my work — as in, she straight up copied-and-pasted my writing into her book and put her own name on the cover. When I went to her office to talk to her about it, she said, “Oh, sometimes there’s only one way to word things.” She claimed there was nothing she could do, but “offered” to “let” me write some lesson plans about her book to publish on the companion website for the book, because in her words, she “really supports the careers of young women.” I declined.

    My next stop was the office of the chair of the department. The chair was supportive, at least initially. I showed her my original writing and we looked at Dr. Plagiarism’s book together. It was an open-and-shut case, not to mention a major ethics violation in our discipline. The chair murmured some stuff about “making me whole” but nothing much came of it.

    Eighteen months passed. EIGHTEEN MONTHS! For some reason, Dr. Plagiarism suddenly got it in her head that I had wronged her and that she was owed an apology. The chair summoned me to her office and gave me a long, abusive speech about how I had a chip on my shoulder about wanting credit for my work, that I should have kept silent, and that by making the accusation, I had forced the chair to open an investigation, which “cast a shadow” over Dr. Plagiarism. The chair even pressured me to write a note of apology to Dr. Plagiarism.

    I quit a few months later.

    I am now happily employed in an organization where I have wonderful, normal colleagues. After I left, my former department was engulfed in a scandal that was widely reported in the national news.

    1. CW*

      I hope you never wrote that apology. You were the one who was owed an apology. I hate how Dr. Plagiarism twisted everything around. These people really piss me off to no end.

      And I wonder what university this was and when the news covered it, but I won’t push to ask because I understand privacy.

    2. AGD*

      I am an academic, and this is egregious. Sickeningly bad ethics. In my field, this would blacklist the faculty member for life.

    3. Artemesia*

      I have observed situations in higher ed where famous important grant getters are allowed to abuse junior faculty and grad students — not quite this egregious but close. Universities can be incredibly unethical since apparently fame and fortune are the most important things.

  189. Yellow Springs*

    I was hired at a tiny specialty architecture firm run by a sole proprietor. It was completely bananas in many ways, including that the employees he ever hired were young attractive women. Anyway, the most junior employee was generally stuck with office manager tasks in addition to their real job until they could be promoted, which included ordering office supplies and coffee, sending out mailings, that kind of thing. Not my area, but I was willing to go along with it. I was there for a few weeks when my boss decided my first major project was to plan a big party to celebrate their recent relocation to a new office. Am I a party planner? Absolutely not. Who was on my party planning team? Just me, with the boss’s wife “helping.”

    The planning process ended up involving me trying to plan the party, and the boss’s wife sending me emails chewing me out for not planning the party the way she wanted. I designed an invitation, and she sent me back a page-long email giving a scathing critique of everything that needed to be reconfigured on the invitation, and by exactly how many pixels they needed to be moved. Somehow, based on her desires, the menu was set, and I think we ended up with a Middle Eastern theme — stuffed grape leaves and the like. The week before the party, the boss’s wife told me that she had taken it upon herself to book live music, which totally blew our budget and was to be kept as a surprise for everyone else until the night of the party. Guess what she booked? A Mariachi band! Of course.
    Anyway, the day arrived and we had our Middle Eastern Mariachi party. Everyone came and had a good time. My dad was invited, and he spent a few minutes chatting pleasantly with my new boss and getting to know him.

    The next morning, I was fired, effective immediately, with no explanation.

    …I’m still completely perplexed about what happened there in those two months of my life.

  190. Banditqueen82*

    When I did my internship for my paralegal studies degree, I was working for 2 attorneys who shared the same building – one of the attorneys seriously expected me to take care of his parking tickets and credit card bills on top of an insanely busy caseload. He’s a brilliant attorney but had NO communication skills whatsoever.

  191. UKgreen*

    I was asked on two separate occasions in two different jobs to go and install software on people’s computers. Except it was pirated, illegally downloaded software.

    1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      I was asked on two separate occasions in two different jobs to go and install software on people’s computers. Except it was pirated, illegally downloaded software.

      I had that happen, too. I was too young to casually mention the Business Software Alliance at the time.

      Now I spend too much time explaining the difference between Free/Libre/Gratis/Open Source Software and pirated software.

  192. Sabina*

    I worked for a branch of the Federal courts as a jury coordinator in the late eighties. One of my duties was to make a recorded message on Fridays before closing to direct potential jurors whether or not to appear on Monday for scheduled jury selection. Trials were often canceled at the last moment because attorneys decided to plea out their clients and the lawyers had until mid-day Friday to inform the court.

    Some brilliant administrator decided it would be nice to give the attorneys more time to decide so they should be allowed to call me AT
    HOME on Sunday night and I would call every potential juror (often 200 or more) to tell them not to appear . This bone headed plan was only scuttled when they realized that we didn’t necessarily have current phone numbers for all jurors. But no problem with me calling people in the middle of the night from my home.

  193. Rachel*

    When I worked at a movie theater as a teenager, I spent an entire shift combing the carpeted walls in preparation for an upcoming inspection lol. Still one of the best jobs I ever had.

  194. Mare*

    All of the below came from someone in authority over me:
    -Hire someone who was unqualified but met the minority hiring requirement in order to secure government contracts.
    -Change the timecard for someone, daily, so she would not be paid overtime. It was 15-20 minutes each time.
    -Write a letter to support a manager’s decision to fire someone. The letter was very vague because I did not want to do it and the manager told me he changed the letter to suit what he needed it for. I had written it in an editable document.
    -Take someone out of consideration for a job because they were “old”.
    -Change grades on a final exam because the adult students complained and whined about how they were paying for the course.
    -Stay 5 minutes late every day so it didn’t look like I wanted to leave.
    – Offer a higher salary to a candidate because he was male and “we’ll probably have to pay him more.”

  195. Sans Serif*

    Don’t know if anyone has mentioned this, but I’m remembering the person whose boss wanted everyone to see if they were a match to give his brother a kidney.

    I don’t think there is anything that could ever happen to me that would top that.

  196. I Faught the Law*

    I had a co-worker a number of years ago who had some mental health issues. We weren’t really friends, but I had fed her cats once or twice (at my boss’s, not my co-worker’s, request) and had a key to her apartment. One weekend, she checked herself into a mental healthy facility and her brother got my phone number from my boss and called me early on Sunday morning to request that I go over to her place, sort through her clothes, underwear, and personal belongings, pack her a suitcase, and drop it off at the hospital. After I did all this, it turned out that he hadn’t given me the necessary information to get it to her – I was supposed to have a confidential “patient ID number” or something instead of her name. So I stood in the mental hospital lobby getting screamed at by a nurse and trying to get in touch with the brother for the ID number. I suffer from anxiety and depression myself, so the whole experience was extremely triggering. I went into work the next day and told my boss I wanted nothing to do with this woman, ever again.

  197. Anonymato*

    Not me, but a colleague was recently asked to give the company’s owner a haircut. And no, we are not a salon.

  198. Caz*

    Cover a colleague’s maternity leave (6 months) while being paid only my normal substantive salary, not my colleague’s rate. There were several promises of “we’ll review how you’re doing” and “your salary will be increased if you meet a certain standard (but there are no metrics for that standard provided)”.

    Reader, I did it. I was young and foolish.

  199. docFoxtopus*

    After approving a contractor’s time off for her wedding (well in advance), my boss told me that I had to tell her she could not – in fact – have the time off for her wedding (it was in India and already paid for, with family, and also when COVID finally slowed down, so she hadn’t seen her family in a year+).

    Boss’ reason? “We may need her onsite, and she owes us this.” – it was COVID, we were full remote, no one was onsite, and she was a contractor – she owed us nothing.

    I left very shortly afterwards and have been in a lot of therapy because of that job.

  200. Kay*

    I’m a faculty member at a large public university. The orientation director messed up the orientation schedule for incoming students and had them severely over-scheduled and without enough time to move in their belongings. Cue the email to faculty and staff, asking us to move the students’ personal effects into their dorm rooms for them! I still wonder how the director thought that was a better option than moving back the campus tours by a couple of hours…

    1. Artemesia*

      Did they do it? Would have been a cold day in hell before I did this. (and I have served breakfast to incoming students and their families, given speeches, attended lots and lots of ceremonies, worked with teams of students during orientations etc — but move their stuff into their dorm rooms — uh uh.

      1. Artemesia*

        And to clarify — the breakfast service was a ‘tradition’ and it was new grads and their parents before graduation — not incoming students.

      2. Kay*

        No, at the last minute we all got a reprieve. The faculty union got involved and that gave the staff some cover to refuse, too. It involved a very senior faculty member saying in a public forum, “In 40 years I’ve never been inside a student’s dorm room and we’re not about to start that now” for the administrators to stop pressuring people!

  201. Not an Architect*

    When I was 19 I was an administrative assistant for an architecture and interior design firm in New York. The owner told me to take some papers down to be filed with the Department of Buildings. I got there and the person working the desk at the Department of Buildings said “These require a sworn document from the project architect.”

    So I called the owner and she yelled “Then just sign it, why are you even calling me?” She asked me to lie in a sworn statement saying that I, a 19 year old film major, was an architect who avowed that the new structure would not collapse. And to do this to the face of someone I had clearly just talked to who obviously knew I was not an architect.

    I didn’t do it. She threw a stapler at me when I got back to the office.

    1. Artemesia*

      Congrats at having some common sense at 19 — and not taking legal responsibility for say some Florida condo that would never ever collapse.

  202. Mitford*

    I once had to pick 23,000 perfect magnolia leaves off the ground for a job.

    No, I didn’t work in horticulture or landscaping. My work study job in college was in the Development Office (hence the reason I spent the first 20 years of my working life in fund raising), and this story dates from those days.

    The Director of the Annual Fund at the time had read stories about other colleges and universities using different gimmicks to increase alumni participation and giving. He decided to hop on that bandwagon by including a leaf from one of the stately magnolia that graced the campus in the first annual fund mailing of the year, which went to just about all of the college’s living alumni, who numbered in the tens of thousands. TENS OF THOUSANDS, y’all. That’s a lot of leaves.

    Buildings and Grounds had some not unwarranted concerns about him stripping the magnolia trees bare to a height of six feet, so they told him that he could only have leaves that had fallen on the ground. Thus it was that I, a lowly student employee, was sent out onto the lawn with a box of hefty bags to pick up magnolia leaves. In July. In Williamsburg, VA, the heat and humidity capital of America. And I couldn’t pick just any leaves. These had to be unblemished, undamaged ones suitable for sending to alumni.

    After a couple of days of leaf-picking on the lawn, a large chunk of which was spent explaining to anyone who walked by why a student was out picking up leaves by hand, I had hundreds of well-formed leaves. “Have you considered using a rake?” was a frequent comment. My boss, however, felt that I wasn’t picking them fast enough to have enough for one the first annual fund mailing would go out in September, so he went with Plan B. That was to have Buildings and Grounds vacuum up the leaves and we would sort them.

    Thus it was that I, and eventually all Development Office employees, had to sort through bag after bag of leaves and other things to gather thousands of leaves. Sometimes the leaves were wet, and we would have to lay them out to dry in unused (for the summer) classrooms near our office, the Development Office at the time being located in the old chemistry building, then gather them back up. If people went on vacation, we would “mulch” the floor of their offices to let leaves dry. The whole floor of the building smelled earthy.

    Eventually, after his leaf quality standards were relaxed a bit, there were enough leaves assembled. That’s when we had to hand stuff the entire annual fund mailing instead of having it done at a fulfillment house because the fulfillment house’s equipment couldn’t handle stuffing the leaves. It was a long, long summer, and I earned every penny of my miserly student wages.

    The next year, he decided to have the stationery for the annual fund impregnated with smell of bayberry to evoke that colonial feeling and we got all sick from bayberry fumes.

    2. Toads, Beetles, Bats*

      I know this College. In a student job at the same place, I was once asked to literally cut (with scissors) and paste (with a glue stick) quotations from one Word document into the margins of another Word document.

      2. Hark upon the gale*

        I WENT to this college, I kinda wanna know what year this was, and where my magnolia leaf is :P

    3. Tricksie*

      Wow, I am an alumna of that university and I never received a magnolia leaf in my fund raising mailer… I am glad you didn’t have to pick one for me, and also I kind of wish I got one because that is A Story.

      1. Mitford*

        This was slightly over 40 years ago, so it’s quite possible that it was before your time, since I am now officially Older Than Dirt.

    4. learnedthehardway*

      I just gave myself a cramp from laughing so hard.

      I can only imagine how the alumni felt about getting a dead leaf in their “please give us money” letters from the university.

      1. Mitford*

        There were actually more complaints about the bayberry-scented stationery the next year. That scent was…. strong.

        1. Friend of Bill and Mary*

          Had a buddy who worked in Development at the College’s good friend down the street: Ye Olde American Towne. He said that a small but distinct subset of the donors became absolutely unhinged every year when they received a calendar in the mail. I bet there was crossover with your contingent.

          1. Mitford*

            Alumni can have some very strong opinions about what is/isn’t correct. When I worked there in the 1970s as a student, there were still a couple of nonagenarian alumni who’d respond to the annual by indicating their ongoing displeasure that the college had gone coed — in 1918. There was also a small, but highly vocal group, that were miffed that the college had recently begun offering a degree in computer science. They felt that computers belonged at a vocation school or community college, not at one of the nation’s finest liberal arts schools.

  203. LemonLime*

    We had a coworker in an outer office battling cancer. In her last few weeks of work, she worked from home with a work laptop. Unfortunately she lost the battle with cancer. Everyone was saddened and shook from her passing. Everyone but my boss who was concerned about the laptop and getting it back ASAP. So I had to cold call this outer office to ask for the laptop and then (from my bosses insistence), I had to ask the coworkers to ask the bereaved spouse about it.
    I was young in my career and didn’t have the nerve to push back. Now I’d tell the boss if they’re so worried about a dang laptop let them be the one to call and harass upset coworkers.

    1. Bee Eye Ill*

      That reminds me of something that happened to an in-law who died of cancer. Two days after he died – before they even had the funeral – his business partners tried to lowball his wife into buying out the share of the business she inherited when he died. They offered something like $40k. She lawyered up and they ended up settling for over $250k which was the fair evaluation. Shameless!

      1. Elizabeth West*

        Did anyone watch that Bob Ross documentary on Netflix? That’s basically what his business partners allegedly did. They harassed the poor man on his deathbed. Warning if you want to watch it; it’s heartbreaking and it will make you furious.

    2. HeraTech*

      Ugh, I was “that person” trying to figure out how to delicately ask for a laptop back when my coworker died suddenly. Some of the project files were only on his laptop and I had deadlines that I still needed to hit. I think we got it back a week or two after he passed, but it still felt icky to have to ask while they were grieving. And I made a point of copying all of his personal files (lots of pictures of his daughter) onto a flash drive and getting them back to his widow.

  204. BlueBelle*

    I was working as a Corporate Trainer for a call center. I planned my wedding around when there wasn’t a hiring time, and booked the 2 weeks off 6 months in advance.
    3 months before my wedding they asked me to change my wedding date so I could train a class of new hires. No.
    They also asked that during a winter storm I stay at the hotel across the street so I would be there to teach a class, they weren’t paying. When I told them no, they told me that I should always have a bag packed so if the weather turned bad I could stay across the street and not miss any time.

      1. RebelwithMouseyHair*

        Good idea, if OP doesn’t have anything to do in her own home like tend to her children or pets or even just catch up on a series or use up some veg that will go bad if she doesn’t eat it…

  205. Florida Fan 15*

    Not my story but my husband’s. Years ago he managed one of the largest beach nightclubs in the southeast US, super popular at Spring Break. The kind of place where you figured they had a printing press in the backroom, that’s how much cash they took in.

    One year in the off season they’re having some construction work done. Carpenters have a tendency to throw bent nails on the ground and go on working. The owner tells my husband to go over the whole property and pick up the bent nails — not because he was worried about safety or aesthetics, but because he wanted him to hammer them straight again and give them back to the construction crew to save a few pennies.

    1. Zweisatz*

      These people are such a mystery to me. How do you not compare his hourly rate to the price of a nail (if this would even have made a difference in billing) and come to the conclusion that this does make no sense at all?

    2. Narvo Flieboppen*

      This reminds me of a summer job I had with my dad in my teens. He did carpentry as a side hustle and I got roped into assisting with a larger job. The client refused to pay for a $5 box of nails. Instead, I was paid $20 an hour to hammer the old nails straight so they could be re-used. Money well spent, clearly.

      1. Despachito*

        Did you just… you know, go to the store, get the $5 box of nails, and then spend the rest of your time twiddling your thumbs for $20 an hour ?

  206. Beatrix*

    I work in academic administration, and one of the professors that I worked with passed away. (died on his way to a faculty meeting, which is tragic for a whole variety of reasons) He’d been in his office for about 30 years, and had never cleaned it out. Technically, the job should have fallen to his family or to one of his colleagues, but his family wasn’t interested, and the colleague who would have done it was 80+ years old and devastated by the loss of his longtime (and much younger) colleague… so I did it. It took me weeks of sorting through 5 foot piles of papers, overloaded bookcases, overflowing drawers, etc. Some of the stuff I found was fascinating, including 30 year old department handbooks and 50+ year old technology, but I also threw out about 15 massive trash bins of just Stuff, and went through probably 5 full containers of Lysol wipes. I cannot convey to you how disgusting this office was.

    I was the Assistant Director of the department. I had plenty of other things that were actually my job that I should have been doing. I just chose to assign myself this completely unreasonable task instead.

    1. Seeking Second Childhood*

      Ironically, your school’s archive might have liked to do that… if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation in the future, that’s what I would suggest. You never know if you might be filling in a gap in a series of uni publications.
      But good for you for not making the 80 year old clean out his friend’s office!

  207. Rowan*

    When I was working as a independent computer tutor in the late 90s (just before the turn of the century?), I had a customer, a woman in her 60s, ask me to show her “naked men on the internet”. Apparently her husband had been shown naked women on the internet by his nephew, and they were kinda competitive with each other, so…

    This being the late 90s, I had to call a friend to ask where we might be able to find such a thing. He gave us a URL. We went there and spent a few minutes looking at naked men, as requested.

    It turned out to be not so exciting as she thought. After a while she said, “I think these pictures are not meant for us” (which is true, they were aimed at men).

  208. Person1*

    I shared an office with my boss, and he asked me to occasionally move his computer mouse around when he was outside the office so his computer wouldn’t fall asleep.

    1. Generic Name*

      Sounds like he know (or thought) that the company had tracking software that tracked when a user was deemed “active” based on mouse movement.

  209. Janet*

    More a theoretical ask than a real one, but…. In an interview many years ago for a job as a reporter at a community newspaper, the (male) editor doing the interview asked me what I’d be prepared to do to get a story. I asked something about what he meant, and he said that if I were wearing a tight skirt and someone was running away from me that I wanted to interview, and then hopped over a fence, would I chase them? And how would I get over a fence in a tight skirt? I was so flabbergasted about the ridiculousness of that scenario that I’m not even sure how I answered the question. When they later phoned me to offer me the job, I not only told them no, but I said that I wanted to stress that I didn’t have any other job offer at that point, and it was still a definite no because of the tone of the interview. I was so young and fierce — they could not have picked a worse person to approach with an interview like that.

  210. Rose*

    Some highlights from my last job (legal assistant to a narcissistic attorney):
    1. I had to make him coffee every day (we had a Keurig and he could have done it) and I had to pick up his lunch and bring it to him on an actual plate. The sandwich had to be cut in half. I wish I were joking!
    2. I had to make doctor’s appointments for him and I often fielded phone calls from receptionists asking why he hadn’t shown up.
    3. I was forced to call all males “Mr. ______” and call all females by their first name.
    4. I felt my brain atrophying from not using my degree and skills and being talked down to every day. I only gave one week notice when I left for my current awesome job. No regrets!

  211. DANGER: GumptionAhead*

    My absolutely worst boss asked me to ensure it wasn’t going to rain on a day she planned an outdoor event

    2. Shiba Dad*

      At an old job I worked on a project at a National Weather Service office. They told me stories about people calling them to ask about the weather months in advance of events they were planning.

  212. Carlottasouffle*

    Back in my executive assistant days just after college, I was asked to drive to my boss’s house, disarm the alarm, go upstairs into his and his wife’s bedroom and look in their top dresser drawer for his bathing suit and then drive said bathing suit to the airport (another ~45 minutes away) and give it to him before his flight. I did do it. He was very thankful. The office manager when she heard was so embarrassed and told me he shouldn’t have asked me to do that. They did reimburse me for my mileage at least! That was the first and last time I was ever asked to go to his house.

    1. tamarack and fireweed*

      Good lord. Someone with an executive assistant should be able to afford picking up a bathing suit at an airport, or, if they have a body shape not catered to by airport retail, find something suitable to swim in during their trip.

  213. The Rural Juror*

    Thought of another that’s pretty infuriating –

    I worked for a restaurant/bar in the first year after I graduated college. It’s pretty normal for the whole staff to come in during a time the establishment is closed for a full deep clean. We’d clock in and get paid at a higher rate for those hours since our usual pay depended on tips. However, this place thought it was ok to have the servers, bartenders, and kitchen staff come in for a “deep clean” that included completely repainting the railings on the patio. We were wearing clothing that could get dirty, but it was winter and none of us expected to have to be dressed to paint outdoors. I ended up getting paint on my winter coat and completely ruining it. I couldn’t afford another one at the time, so I went around for a while wearing a black coat with white paint splatters on it.

  214. Beth*

    My favourite Crazy Work Request story is one that, in any other context, would have been appalling — but was actually perfectly reasonable in context.

    My team lead asked me to bend over so she could pin a giant sequined heart on my ass.

    The context: I was working in professional theatre, in the costume shop for a major opera company. We were working on the costumes for “La Boheme”, which includes a scene with saucy Parisian dancers. I was working on the VERY fancy drawers for the lead dancer, which were bright orange/pink changeable organza, very full and ruffled. At the end of the number, the dancer was going to turn her back on the audience and flash her butt, and the costume design called for a giant sequined appliqued heart to be on said butt.

    In professional costume shops, the team leads are called “cutters”: they make the patterns, cut the fabric, do the fittings on the performers, and supervise the construction of the costumes. I was a “stitcher”: I made the costumes under the cutter’s supervision.

    I made the drawers, I made the heart. Then I brought the drawers and the heart to my cutter, with a grin, pointing out that she was going to have to determine exactly where on the drawers the heart would be placed. She gave me a Look and said, “Okay. Put these on [the drawers] and bend over.”

    I did, and she pinned the heart, without stabbing me, even though I was laughing so hard that it was probably rather jiggly. Then I stood up, took off the drawers (which I had put on over my jeans), took them back to my work station and finished the costume.

    Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of the moment. I wish I did.

  215. Wicked Stitch*

    A customer told me to dig through a broken glass bin to find a piece of glass the right size to fix a heavily discounted chipped mosaic table. This was demanded of me because I couldn’t discount it further. I had to explain with a straight face that no, I would not, it is in fact a health and safety concern. I don’t think I managed because she just got more offended.

  216. Kay*

    Both of these were at the same job; I was VERY young.

    A coworker asked me to remove her stitches from a recent small surgery. She lived alone and didn’t want to go back to a doctor to get it done. I’m not squeamish at all and did it in one of the single bathrooms down the hallway

    Another coworker asked me to give him a haircut at work. He said he’d never had a stranger cut his hair, it was always friends, and he had a whole thing about it. So I cut his hair, the first and ever time I cut hair, in the bathroom at work. He brought in a cape, clippers, scissors, and a dustpan and broom for cleaning up; it was clearly not the first time he’d done this.

    (that job was very weird in very many ways)

  217. KayEss*

    One of many legendary tales about the owner of the small business I worked for was that she held a grudge against an employee for years because he didn’t offer to pull her rolling suitcase for her on a business trip.

  218. Very Very Anonymous*

    I was working as a consultant at a Large Company Now Featured In Business Schools for What Not To Do.

    I was part of a team hired to document a certain error-prone business process. The boss told us he didn’t want it documented as he got a lot of political power from being the only one who knew how it worked. He brought in Christmas videos and we sat around watching them instead – for weeks. I learned all the words to the Frosty animated special by heart

    Eventually the contract ended with no documentation being produced and no improvements made to the process. I (and the other contractors) left. A few months later, the feces hit the air circulator, the press was involved, and Large Company went out of business.

  219. Blame Panama*

    I was working on an international project between Florida, Panama, and Colombia. The project lead was a notorious cheapskate and hated rules on principle (well, only ones that applied to him). In order to save money, I was tasked with flying to Panama to give $10,000 to our Colombian counterpart. It was the “only way” the project could move forward.
    I declined. Somehow the project moved forward without 10k in cash illegally moving countries (although a legal purpose, the methods were…questionable).

  220. ToxicBossTarget*

    I have a few doozies:

    1. Account rep at a bank. My boss found out that a customer was interested in me, so she invited him to skip the line and go straight to my office to ask me out. When I politely declined (nice guy, just not my type, and also WTF), she called me into the bank lobby to berate me about saying no and demanded I explain to her exactly why I didn’t want to be set up at work with a random guy. In front of all my coworkers and customers.
    2. Legal assistant/receptionist. Attorney was going to court, and had me draft the voir dire questions, opening statement, and closing statement. I also drafted most of her deposition questioning for this client. This is paralegal/junior associate type work. I was an admin making $11/hr.
    3. Legal marketing coordinator. An attorney had borrowed the IT’s spare laptop and taken it to a conference. He was flying back one morning and didn’t feel like coming into the office after the flight. IT needed their laptop back, so guess who drove to the airport at 7:30 am to meet the attorney there so I could take the laptop back to the office? It wasn’t even my department that needed the laptop – I was just a convenient gopher.

    All different jobs. Thankfully my current boss is exceptionally reasonable.

  221. Anima*

    Make all the signage for the facility we were at.
    I got handed some rolls of printed canvases and had to make signs out of it. Some of them were so big I could have slept comfortably on them. I made like ten of them, alone, because we were perpetually understaffed. Then I got asked if I would hang them up, in like a 6m high building. I refused that, thank godness.
    I also had to remake the outside sign twice, once it got vandalized and the other time a storm threw it around. That one got professionally made and hung up in the end.
    In the end all signage except the big one on the outside was made by me (the outside one required a permit.)

    I did it, but I quit shortly after.

    At least I did not have to design and print them myself. :D

  222. sequitur*

    My former boss once had an issue with a nanny who’d had an alcoholism relapse while working for him; she’d been drunk on the job while caring for his kids and he didn’t see any option but to fire her. Initially he asked me to go with him as a witness to that conversation so that she couldn’t claim anything inappropriate had transpired. Then he had a big business emergency to go back to attend to at the office, and the nanny was in no shape to pack up her stuff, so he asked me to stay and help her get packed (which involved going into town to buy new suitcases because she didn’t have enough luggage) and make sure she got into the car he’d called for her. Oh, and the boss was going on vacation the next day so he tossed in a “while you’re there, can you clear out my fridge?” request.

    Standing outside his big rich guy house scraping the remains of a chicken carcass into his food waste bin was a real low point for me career-wise, and that whole incident remains a significant reason why I’d never consider executive assistant work again.

  223. Midori987*

    This wasn’t asked of me but my manager – I worked at an outdoor seafood restaurant in the early 2010’s and an extremely large woman couldn’t fit into the bathroom stall and was about to have an…emergency. The owner of the restaurant asked the general manager to assist the woman by taking her into the fenced off dumpster area and holding a garbage bag in a bucket underneath her while two bus boys helped hold her up over it. He actually did it! It was completely surreal.

  224. LKW*

    I was an office manager and the boss asked me to research satellite dishes and contracts so he could have a dish installed in the office so he could watch the World Cup. I declined the assignment and told him I’ll be focusing my time on work tasks.

  225. Youngin*

    When I was 20, I worked at a restaurant as a hostess, but I had culinary training from a vocational High School so it wasn’t weird for me to, very occasionally, cover for a line chef when the executive chef needed help (which was always. he got hired as an executive chef when he had only worked as a front of house manager so he had no clue how to schedule or do inventory, well he didn’t know how to do anything). I would also step in and call food out when the executive chef had paperwork to do. (I know red flag)

    Before this instance, I had only worked doing appetizers and desserts, which is like the lowest ring of the totem pole on most lines, and I had only covered them twice. One shift, I came into a complete disaster with the kitchen. Our meat chef had walked out for some reason. The other guys on the line were much worse off than I was so they begged me to be on meat, which ugh. It was intimidating. So I get changed really quickly, throw on different shoes, wipe off all my make up and jump right in. I put out about 6-8 dishes on time and the kitchen is slowly catching up. About an hour in, I realized the small meat fridge I had been pulling from on the line wasn’t cold at all. I completely freak out because I realize I could have easily just poisoned some of our guests. I grab back a plate I just put in the window and throw it away and tell him why. Well the chef freaked out on me and insisted I not waste the meat. I refused and started walking to the main fridge for every single dish, a massive waste of time putting us further behind. He gets mad at me and tells me to stop doing that and eventually kicks me back to salads and desserts while another person handled meats, from the broken fridge.

    I left that night so distraught. When I realized the fridge still hadn’t been fixed 2 nights later, and after the executive had gone back on a promise he made to get me a day off for familiar reasons, I called the health department and pretended to have food poisoning. We were shut down the next day for 2 nights, they uncovered A TON OF VIOLATIONS. It was awful.

    The meat Chef walked out that night because he refused to serve bad food and quit on the spot. They tried to get him back after they forcibly fixed the fridge and he agreed because they misrepresented why it was fixed. I told him the real reason, and he never showed back up. We are still great friends even though both of us have left that industry.

  226. Honor Harrington*

    Not me but a co-worker –

    We worked for Xboss. Xboss did not like to cook. Xboss did not like to go anywhere alone. Xboss made my coworker go grocery shopping with him and debate which frozen dinners to buy, every week. Xboss required coworker to keep track of which frozen dinners he had eaten and whether he liked them or not. And coworker did it!

  227. Anonymous Canuck*

    30+ years ago, when I was 17, I worked overnight shifts on weekends at a gas station/truck shop on a major Canadian highway. This truck shop had a restaurant, bathrooms, and private showers for the truckers. For the record, I am female. I hardly worked alone on these shifts with the occasional call out from my partners but regularly, I would be propositioned by skeezy truckers for multiple things. Benign as in “wanna have coffee with me” to “I need company in the shower”.

    All of my male partners laughed it off and found it hilarious that I was uncomfortable and squirming, and being a teenager, I had no concept of how to stand up for myself. Anyway, it came to a head one night when I was working alone and a trucker came in. Long story short, he was by far the worst because he tried to physically drag me into the showers. One of the servers in the attached restaurant came to my rescue thankfully. I was sobbing and terrified but stayed for the remainder of my shift.

    Day manager came in for the morning shift and I told him what happened and what I wanted him to do was…I don’t know, give me sympathy? Instead he suggested I could “use my pretty face and earn extra income”.

    Sadly, it took me another month and a bit to quit.

  228. Bun Bun Babbin*

    About 5 years and 2 jobs ago. I worked at a tech college for trades/apprenticeships. All administrative staff had to work the summer while instructors had the summers off. I used the summers to edit the coursework and set up the coming year. That year I was taking vacation in August so I had to finish up my summer work a month early…so I was busy to say the least. It was also male-dominated, highly conservative, and there was a gross culture there (“work husbands”, women set up the special staff lunches/breakfasts/BBQ, women bring in baking, etc.).

    A couple of days before my vacation starts, my boss comes to me telling me I have to take his kid to the pool (we had a rec/fitness centre for the college teams including a pool, squash courts, hockey rink, etc.). I said no (even though he wasn’t asking me but TELLING me). He said, “Well I’ve already asked all the other women and you’re the only one left. I have a meeting and [child’s name] wants to go to the pool.” I said something along the lines of…well then ask one of the guys, as there was always an odd instructor or two who didn’t have enough vacation for the summer. He said he couldn’t because they were men and had important things to do. I replied more firmly that’s too bad, but I was leaving for vacation in a couple days and I still had to set up the coming year, didn’t have the time, but more importantly it wasn’t my job to babysit his kid and I wasn’t going to be liable in case something happened. I suggested he set him up with a tablet and put on the kid’s favourite movie in the reception of his meeting location. He huffed at me and stomped off muttering about what an inconvenience it was.

    When I got back from vacation, he pulled me into his office. He spend 10 minutes reaming me out over our “professional relationship”. He said stuff like “I thought our relationship was different than that” and “I’m so disappointed that this has affected how we work together”. I responded very calmly and politely over and over again that our relationship was boss and employee, this incident has no bearing on that, and how the incident has nothing to do with my work or how we work together. He kept at me, obviously wanting me to apologize or grovel or something. But I just kept repeating myself.

    Eventually I said if there was nothing else I was going back to work. He treated me VERY differently after that. And by differently I mean significantly worse. I gave him the finger from under my desk every time he passed me, and celebrated when the executive team was reshuffled and he was downgraded from department head to instructor.

    1. MassChick*

      Kudos! I admire the way you handled it. I didn’t have to deal with such overt sexism – it was more subtle in the tech company I worked for. As I read experiences like these, I wonder if I would have had the spine to say no when I was in my twenties and thirties.

  229. The office broom was insufficient to the task*

    This isn’t necessarily unreasonable if you work in cleaning or maintenance, but I work a professional white-collar type job. Nevertheless, when a dog pooped in my workplace, the manager didn’t want to call custodial because they were offsite and it would take too long. I was supposed to pick it up. And because the dog had stepped in it and tracked it the length of the hallway, it wasn’t exactly picking up, more like scraping/wiping/scrubbing. Same for when someone dropped a bottle of Snapple from the upper part of the stairwell: my job was now to clean up a puddle of glass shards. Kiwi-strawberry glass shards.

  230. whistle*

    My boss once called me and another coworker to a meeting to ask us if we could translate a legal contract into German. Not because we were translators or German but because he knew we had taken German in college.

    I told him that wouldn’t be possible. He insisted we could do it and then started going through the contract and asking us how to say certain phrases. I just kept saying “I don’t know” until he gave up.

  231. Nancy Drew*

    It was the mid-1980’s, I was young and naive, and just landed my first fancy job as an admin. asst. for the CEO at a high profile business. Our graphics department photographer approached me and asked if he could photograph me for some marketing brochures for our company. I was flattered and agreed to participate. THEN he instructed me not to wear a bra, and that he was going for a “Cosmopolitan cover” look. I knew the jig was up, but I STILL DIDN’T SAY NO! I just avoided him as much as I could, saying I was “so busy.” Shortly thereafter, he got fired for being caught using company equipment, on company property, while apparently photographing his other cosmopolitan models.

  232. talos*

    I had to underage drink!

    I was an undergrad working on a university research project. I and another grad student from my institution had to travel to another state to deploy a test setup in a testbed, and were out there for a week. Several days in, we had dinner with a collaborating researcher at the institution we were deploying at, at their home.

    To celebrate the successful deployment that day (it wasn’t successful, but only I knew that since I was the only one with the right kind of expertise, and I didn’t want to deal with explaining why), they got out some sparkling wine. They offered me some. I was 19 at the time, told them that, and politely turned them down. We had several minutes of discussion, and they told me that I really ought to drink because this was a European household (the person was, in fact, from Europe) and nobody was going to complain. I drank because I didn’t want to keep having the argument.

    This was the first time I’d ever had more than a sip of alcohol. I was clearly junior to everyone there (the only undergrad), nobody really liked me because I was something of a “hard truth fairy” since they wanted impossible things and I was the only person who knew enough to tell them the things wouldn’t work, that made me kind of dislike them, and all of that made the possibility of saying something bad while drunk real and scary.

    I think I said a couple weird things, but nothing too bad. I did manage to turn down a third glass.

    1. talos*

      That’s actually not my only underage-drinking-at-work story…

      I was an intern, and I was invited to the team’s holiday Zoom chat. The manager bought everyone a beer for this chat, which was nice of her.

      She asked me what my taste in beer was, and I informed her that I wasn’t all that familiar since I was still 20. She asked when my 21st birthday was. It was literally 2 days after the holiday chat, so she bought me a beer anyway and told me to just not drink it until I turned 21.

      That manager was much more chill.

  233. I WORKED on a Hellmouth*

    Oh lord, I have so many. Several involved being forced to clean various offices or work places on my hands and knees when I had neck and knee injuries (I was not in positions that involve any cleaning). But probably THE most unreasonable work requests are from my time working at the Hellmouth. I have sooooooooo many, but if I have to pick just one it would have to be the time that HellBoss had a meeting where she told us that we were all being paid “top dollar” and that if we wanted to be paid “top dollar” we would need to be comfortable stepping outside of our job descriptions moving forward. And immediately after that we started getting all SORTS of crazy and unreasonable assignments.

    So, I happen to sew sometimes. Garments. For myself. For fun only. But HellBoss had found out about this, and informed me that I would be making slipcovers for every stick of furniture in our office, our seating area, and our clubhouse. Also, custom curtains. So, if you know anything about sewing, you know that this is a horrible, horrible request already. If you don’t know anything about sewing–it takes a lot of time, it is real labor, and there is a big difference between sewing a dress from a beginner’s sewing pattern and drafting custom slip covers. We’re talking hours and hours and HOURS of labor.

    So I tried to say that I didn’t know anything about sewing custom slip covers. “Youtube and Pintrest,” my boss told me, and the next day she brought in an almost foot high stack of printed tutorials “from the internet.” I reminded her that she had told me that the company didn’t want me working any overtime and that I wouldn’t be able to stay late anyway, which threw her for a minute–she was clearly expecting me to do all of this work off of the clock on my own time (which I already had picked up on, and was NOT going to allow to happen)–and then she just trilled “Oh, you’ll just set your sewing machine up over there and do it during your regular work day!” And I just looked at her for a minute because SHE WANTED ME TO BRING MY PERSONAL MACHINE? and also WHAT? before saying “I just have a little home machine for garment making, I don’t think it will handle upholstery fabric, and if I am sewing who will do [insert the highly time sensitive tasks that filled my full 8 hour days with no downtime]?” She gaily told me that I could easily do both at once, and that my machine could definitely handle upholstery fabric because it was going to be from Walmart. I can not begin to convey the wrongness of all of that, on every level. Then she chirpily told me that she would start looking for fabric that week and for me to go ahead and bring my machine in right away so it would be ready to go whenever she found something.

    The next day I came in and very somberly told her that my machine had broken, and I had no idea how long it would take to have it repaired. Alas. Alack.

    She didn’t ask about the machine again, and if I recall correctly, she was fired not too long after that.

      1. I WORKED on a Hellmouth*

        Thank you! It was really the only way–she refused to take a soft no, and a hard no–well, there is a reason that I call her HellBoss. It would not have gone well for me.

        She was still pretty miffed/clearly knew I was lying, but couldn’t really do anything about it.

        1. DANGER: GumptionAhead*

          At least she didn’t remember that hand-sewing is possible because you know she would have asked for that

          1. I WORKED on a Hellmouth*

            I can not imagine. The horror. OF HAND STITCHING ANY OF THAT. Let alone while doing my actual full time job. And all for the same hourly wage (which in no way was high enough for that kind of project, let alone that kind of project PLUS my actual job).

    2. Goody*

      Is there a compilation somewhere of all of the Hellmouth stories? I know I’ve seen a few over the years!

  234. Beth*

    On a less hilarious note: the most unreasonable thing I’ve ever been asked to do was when I had a sadly short-term job at a community college. I really liked the job, and tried to apply for it permanently — only to be told that I wasn’t qualified for it. I had just finished a program at that same community college that should have qualified me, but they didn’t count their own credential as adequate; and my already being in the job didn’t count either. The department head took a few minutes off from his busy schedule of puffing up the credential to explain to me why it wasn’t good enough for me to work in his department.

    Then I was told I had to train my replacement. Non-negotiable.

    I did train her. She was a very nice person. I also told her that I had tried to apply for the job, and why I hadn’t even been allowed to apply, and how I had then been told to train her in how to do the job that I was holding but wasn’t qualified to keep. Because she was a nice person, she was horrified.

    1. I WORKED on a Hellmouth*

      Their credential. Didn’t. Qualify you.

      NOOOOOOOT OKAAAAAAAAY. You should have asked the department head to issue you a refund for your program.

    2. Artemesia*

      FWIW. it is generally considered a very bad idea for schools to hire their own graduates — it is a way to diminish the quality of programs over time as one is not bringing in
      ‘new blood’. new ideas, people with other experiences and training. In the university I taught in we never hired our own PhDs for tenure track positions for that reason even though many of them were hired at other prestigious universities and had stellar careers. Occasionally a senior scholar who had made their career somewhere else was hired back at the alma mater, but not a recent grad.

  235. PinkyPie*

    In my first post-college job in NYC, I worked as an executive assistant for a prominent physician in a well-known, ritzy location in the city. Here are a few of the more, um, memorable things he asked me to assist with:

    – Order gifts for his MANY mistresses (which included patients and a fellow doctor)
    – Purchase underwear on his behalf; then, exchange it when I initially purchased the wrong kind (this was after I endured a painfully detailed explanation of why they were not satisfactory)
    – Scrub his coffee cups after he finished eating his oatmeal with Metamucil mixed in (this still makes me gag to recall, woof)
    – Order Zone Diet meals to be delivered to the office, then wash the Tupperware containers in which they were delivered so that he could reuse them

    He was a total creep who totally sexually harassed me and my coworkers. If I could turn back time, man would I ever sue him.

    1. Chauncy Gardener*

      Oatmeal with Metamucil?? Gag! and then all the rest of it too. You poor thing! That’s just awful

  236. Marge*

    I was told that I had to magically fix the broken service elevator that I had no idea even existed in our building….

  237. AVP*

    This isn’t on par with some of the above comments, but I am completely not a morning person and this was almost the last straw at this particular job.

    I was a very underpaid office manager working at an arts org and was really struggling to make ends meet, but it was during the 2009 recession so job hunting was just a disaster and I was happy to be employed in this field. My boss’s apartment co-joined our office in a live-work building, so they were very separate spaces but I had access to his apartment if I needed it.

    He was going on a weeks-long business trip right when the building decided they needed to renovate the roof right above his apartment and would be taking down his full ceiling and replacing it. Annoying, but conveniently they could do it while he was out of town. Well, he decided that he didn’t want the construction workers in his apartment unattended, and made me come in every morning at 6am to watch them (so I would drag my butt out of bed and then just…sit there looking a my phone bc I didn’t have work to do that early). And then stay til the usual 6pm end of the day. So he added 4 hours onto the day for me to just sit there looking like a narc and feeling so stupid and tired.

    I ended up blowing up about the lack of OT offered and everyone bent over backwards to make me feel better and appreciated…but ultimately there was no OT and I still had to do it. And the construction workers were totally fine and not trying to, like, steal his stuff or whatever he expected.

  238. Exhausted Youth Min*

    Anyone who has worked in church youth ministry can tell you-church people love nothing more than getting teenagers to do free labor. In my time as a youth pastor I’ve seen things ranging from “kind requests” to outright hostility over things such as “Would you get the youth to come over Saturday morning at 7:30 and shovel gravel?”, “Could you drive a couple kids over to my friend’s house an hour away and repaint it? It would be a great educational experience”, “We need the youth to make 500 sandwiches by tomorrow.”, etc. Sometimes it’s not bad when I politely decline on the spot or report back that I couldn’t get anyone to volunteer, but I’ve had people try and get me fired over not successfully wrangling gaggles of teenagers to do free labor that no one else wants to do.

    1. Gumby*

      So. Much. This.

      It’s not even a paid job for me – our youth group is small. Oddly, I sometimes have more show up for service projects than purely fun things. Parental pressure? No idea. Though the kids are great. We have several projects that they take on every year (or did pre-COVID) that serve the congregation and the community. But it is the spur of the moment, “this needs doing, who can do it? I know! the kids!” type things that tend to stress me out. Though if we can’t do it people usually accept that gracefully.

  239. Anonymousaurus Rex*

    This is not so much being asked to do something unreasonable, but being told unreasonably that I *can’t* do something I should. I’m part of my company’s DEI team and LGBTQ+ Workgroup. The company is a Medicaid health plan. We are trying to update our member database to include fields for both assigned sex at birth and gender identity, as well as pronouns. I’ve been told by our legal team that we are not allowed to ask our member’s pronouns or gender identity because it opens us up to legal risk of discrimination by not getting the pronouns right if we have the “preference” documented somewhere. This refusal is mind-blowing to me. It seems like if we don’t ask and only include assigned sex at birth in our documentation we are *definitely* going to get peoples’ genders wrong? (We can’t just change “sex” to “gender” because we need to make sure that trans men get cervical cancer screenings if they have cervixes and similar situations where assigned sex at birth is relevant).

    1. Seeking Second Childhood*

      I thank you for caring. A friend had some horror stories about trying to get his insurance company to authorized surgery to remove a precancerous organ. The insurance company had to recode a data base before they could do so, and his doctor was getting worried.

    2. Your Local Password Resetter*

      I assume they wanted to claim ignorance if they were ever sued for discrimination?
      It’s a terrible policy and clearly designed to cover themselves at the expense of the people they’re supposedly helping.

    3. ArtK*

      I work on a health records system (so very similar to what you are doing) and we include gender at birth, gender identity and sexual orientation; practitioners couldn’t possibly treat someone correctly without that information. There’s no separate category for preferred pronouns but the naming system does include prefix. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a request for pronouns in the pipeline.

      Try using the magic words “patient safety” on your legal department.

  240. AnonButton*

    The director of HR for a large and major university would parade her kids around with their school fundraiser. If you tried to say no, she would point to the cheapest thing and say “surely, you can afford this!” Half the staff were college students.

  241. Squeeble*

    I was helping to organize a conference and writing up bios for all our panelists, headshots included. When I asked one woman for her headshot, she said she didn’t have a good recent one but instead invited me to watch a YouTube video of her being interviewed and take a screenshot from that. Hard eyeroll, but you know what? I did it. It took me like 20 tries to get a screenshot where her mouth wasn’t open or the image wasn’t weird and blurry, but I got it done.

    Then when the conference rolled around, she had the audacity to tell me that MY headshot wasn’t very good and that I was clearly much younger and prettier than my photo indicated. Twice!

  242. Hudson*

    Multiple bosses have brought their kids in and asked me to watch them. I finally put my foot down when one boss brought in his toddler. I essentially told my supervisor that this was more than I could handle if she wanted me to still get my work done. In a functional office, one of us would’ve communicated that to the boss but we were all so scared of him that she ended up taking charge of the kid.

  243. Anonomatopoeia*

    Long time reader, first time poster. I was interning at a small law firm, which had been arranged by my college. The main, male partner would specifically invite me and the other young female intern for afternoon happy hours in a courtyard, but the two older female lawyers rarely if ever joined us. The courtyard was communal for the many other law offices nearby, and he’d have spare glasses for passing lawyers or judges so they could join us. At the time I thought it was amusing and was just happy about the free wine, but maybe don’t use your interns as networking eye candy?

    (And yes, it was pretty clearly intimated that that was why we were invited).

  244. E*

    I used to work in an awful call center. One day my boss asked me to periodically get off the phone and go into the bathroom and look through the gaps into the stalls to see who was on their phone while going to the bathroom. I obviously declined and was fired soon after.

    1. Anonycoke*

      I had something similar- except we were supposed to see who was doing rails of coke. Answer: all of the managers. Call centers, man.

  245. Leela*

    In college I worked at a store where the manager decided she wanted us to paint the bathroom. She fought with the owners of the company forever because they didn’t want to pay us to paint the bathroom in their store, a room the customers weren’t allowed to even see, instead of working the store and due to retail hours we would have basically had to paint into the middle of the night to do it after hours.

    Eventually she told us they caved and to come in on Saturday, she’d close the store, and when we showed up to paint, she gave us…tubes of oil paint. Like the kind that you’d use to paint a canvas. I don’t know what was in them but we kept getting dizzy and having to leave the room to get air and it took forever to smear that paint onto rollers and get it onto walls as if it was wall paint.

    Later we found out the company had never actually given her the okay. They refused to pay because they hadn’t okayed it and we never got paid for it. They were also furious that she’d shut the doors and cost them a whole day of retail sales because she thought it would be cool if the bathroom was repainted.

      1. Leela*

        I don’t think any of us tried to touch it but i do remember that it took *ages* to dry. Also I never saw the numbers but I have to assume that tons and tons of tubes of oil paint would be way more expensive than a can or two of house paint

  246. anonymous 5*

    Probably the most outrageous request from my former dean was that I re-grade a final exam that had been administered by (and already graded by) a colleague, because the student wasn’t happy with their grade. Same dean put pressure on me several times to make exceptions to policies in my syllabus–generally had a track record for undermining faculty.

  247. Fezziwig Knots*

    Clean vomit out of a communal bathroom.

    I spent almost two years working for a well respected indie bookstore in New York City. Our location had only a single bathroom for all employees and it was open to the public. People would behave atrociously in the bathroom, and while I understand we’re all human and have to go sometimes, a public bathroom is not your home and you should behave as such.

    I was a shiftleader and often opened the store on Sundays. Customers would mosey over to the store after brunch nearby and it made the public restroom…a situation. One morning a 30-something guy walked in and said hello to us, used the restroom while he was in the store and left without us being the wiser.

    But after he left, I realized not only had he thrown up in the toilet and not cleaned it up well, he’d also thrown up in the sink and failed to wipe it out. After I cleaned it up, I spoke with management the next day and said in no uncertain terms that minimum wage was not enough to require us to clean up bodily fluids. I wasn’t comfortable asking other staff to do it when I didn’t want to. I suggested if the bathroom continued to be an issue, we needed a professional cleaning crew.

    That wasn’t well received. But since I had already cleaned a cockroach infestation out of the store room, I didn’t get as much pushback as I might have otherwise.

    All this to say that working in indie bookstores across the city is an underpaid and under respected role, and always make sure if you’re in public that you’re respecting the facilities!

  248. In a Better Place*

    I was a temp once. I got placed in a law dept of a larger company. It became pretty clear why this lawyer got temps, bc he treated people bizarrely. But I seemed to be able to roll with it. About once a week he would slam around his office, make a lot of sighing noises, huff out with a pile of books under his arm and shout “THAT’S IT!!! I QUIT!” after the first week I figured out that he was walking t the local library and so whenever he did this I would say “enjoy your walk” or “have fun at the library” (he was secretly pleased that I didn’t rise to his bait.)

    But the thing that kinda made me decide this wasn’t the job for me was one day he walked out with one of those Furby dolls. Showed it to me. Said how cute it was. Then called me in that afternoon and would tell me that from then on I was getting all my directives from Furby. Then he would talk to Furby about my projects, let Furby talk to me in gibberish, and then smile beatifically at me. I took one look at him, told him I didn’t speak Furbish, it was English or nothing, and retuned to my desk. I never was so happy that I had a family emergency a week later and I had to turn in my temp assignment to someone else. They were JUST ABOUT to ask me full time and I was grateful to escape.

  249. That woman in IT*

    I worked in IT at a multi-national company. My responsibilities covered ordering and setting up computers for all levels of employees from manufacturing to great grandboss level. Then training how to use the equipment.

    My department covered a variety of missions and we worked all different shifts, some WFH way back in the early 00’s. I was not responsible for taking calls out of my regularly scheduled hours as there were other people assigned to those hours.

    A guy in my department decided to call me at home around 10 pm because I lived in the same neighborhood and he wanted his laptop fixed *right now.* When I told him I was in my pajamas he got all excited and said to ‘come right over, my wife isn’t here, I’ll make us some drinks!’

    I declined. He kept insisting. I hung up. I knew mentioning this to my supervisor or my boss would just make it into a joke, so I let it go. Laptop got fixed during regular hours, never got another late night call, maybe (Not likely) dude realized he’d been inappropriate.

    At this same job I had to tell a number of guys to remove the porn from their office computers or I wouldn’t work on them. They did. And they told other guys to do the same.

  250. Kattie*

    I worked at a place being audited by the state tax authorities to make sure they were complying with sales tax laws. My boss wanted me to scan all our shipping paperwork and photoshop out of state addresses on them. Told her I was working on it and spent the time updating my resume instead.

  251. Consultant #5*

    My first job was as a host at the Olive Garden. This poor old man had a big “brown” accident all through the hallway leading into the bathroom, into the bathroom, and into the stall. I admit to being the one that sat him at the table that was farthest from the restroom – never occurred to me that doing that might matter. My manager asked me to clean it up, even though janitorial duties were certainly not part of the job description. Being young and naive, it didn’t occur to me that I had options other than rolling up my sleeves and doing it.

    Worst part was that the poor guy was still in the stall trying to clean himself up and came out while I was in the middle of the extensive task. I felt worse for him having to face the poor kid cleaning up after him than I did for me having to clean it up. At least he was cool about it and I think that I was as well.

  252. Anonymous Bureaucrat*

    My boss called me (her assistant) from the road. She had witnessed an accident and wanted me to call 911 for her. That’s…not how it works.

  253. Queen of the Winter Fae*

    Had a boss once ask me to photoshop our product spec report to make it appear our product was in spec for jobs they wanted to bid. My answer: ABSOLUTELY NOT.

  254. Designateddupe*

    Early on I worked at a business that was “like a family” and I was too new to see that red flag. The worst thing they asked me to do was stick around unpaid for 2-3 hours after closing because it was the big boss’s bday and he wanted to get super hammered at the bar but didn’t have a designated driver- so they planned for me to clock in, go to bar, get owner, take him home and then clock out. I refused citing the late hour and that I had to open the next morning – but seriously why would everyone (including his sister who managed the facility) think it is ok me to do that AND demote me unofficially after I refused (tasks taken away and clear preference shown towards folks who were willing to play their game).

  255. Thursdaysgeek*

    It was more to get a job. I cleaned houses to get money for college, and got a call from someone for a job. It was several miles out of town, so I hopped on my bike and headed out. When I arrived, there was a big sign on the gate: “Warning! Vicious Dog! Stay in car and honk horn!” Did I mention I was on a bike? This was long before there were cell phones, so to make a call, I’d have to bike home for several miles. I was young and dumb, and decided to go in anyway. Fortunately for me, the dog had been put down the week before after killing a cow.

    So it wasn’t something unreasonable I was asked to do, but it was something unreasonable that I did do.

  256. AvocadoLime*

    Read 50 grant applications in one day, which happened to be my birthday. I’m sad to say I did it–took me 12 hours, with a 30 minute birthday dinner break with my partner and kids. My careful, highly detailed recommendations were thoroughly disregarded over the next week by leadership.

  257. Anon for this*

    This was not unreasonable because it was my job. But when I was a lifeguard, I was on duty when someone had diarrhea in the pool and OH MY GOD.

    I had just walked in to start an 8 am shift. I had a travel mug of coffee I hadn’t had but a few sips of. And I hear the lifeguard who’s already on duty blow the whistle. I go running out to see what happened, thinking someone is hurt. No one is hurt. But there is loose feces EVERYWHERE. It was an 80,000 gallon pool and it had been lap swim so it was neatly and evenly distributed across the entire pool, like Satan’s confetti.

    It took HOURS of skim netting and vacuuming and backwashing and cleaning skimmer baskets (and then enough shock chlorine to kill a whale) to get that pool back to clean.

    1. Campfire Raccoon*

      LOL I am sorry. This is awful. My son was a lifeguard this summer and TWICE he was working the station at the bottom of the slide when a kid skadooshed on the way down. You have my sympathy.

  258. sub rosa for this*

    Well, I did have a boss once ask me to score some pot for her. (In the 1990s, when it was not even close to legal here.) But that’s absolutely nothing in comparison to some of this stuff, tbh.

    (This wasn’t a once-off for her; she had no sense of boundaries or professionalism. We’d go out after work drinking (yes, I KNOW, but I was young and dumb too) and she used to “order” me to dance with guys who approached her that she didn’t find appealing. Our team, all women, would be called into endless meetings where we were just sitting in her office during working hours listening to her ramble while she went through wedding catalogs for ideas. She kept trying to set up one or another of her direct reports with her ex, and… well, that’s another story.)

    (She also used to call the hot guy from the mailroom and make him come to her office and bend over to pick up things off the floor. I kid you not.)

    1. sub rosa for this*

      Oh, the wedding one below reminded me that she also tried to cancel my wedding. (We weren’t “besties” anymore at that point, so she was no longer asking me to do wildly inappropriate things.)

      I’d had my wedding scheduled and my vacation time approved nearly a year and a half ahead of time. Doing most of it myself, hundreds of miles away in my hometown, so there were a lot of logistics.

      The day after she came back from her 3-week honeymoon, she called me into her office to let me know that I wouldn’t be allowed to take the 2 weeks I’d been approved for ages ago – starting now, the new policy was that none of us could be out for more than 4 consecutive days. (No, nothing happened while she was gone; this was one in a long string of things that I later discovered were all about getting me to quit.) My wedding was in less than 3 months at that point.

      Of course I quit. And found out years later that they never replaced me — there wasn’t enough work for 3 admins any more, so they had been planning to go down to 2. And at the time I had been there the longest of the 3 of us, so I was getting paid the most.

      But it was a very nice wedding. :)

  259. Luna123*

    I asked for three days off between Christmas and New Years to attend an out of state funeral. My boss said it was fine, she’d cover me (because she wouldn’t cross train any of my coworkers, she had to do it herself).

    Then later my boss texted and said that she had a friend several towns away from where I would be, could she get a ride to [Town]? My family and I could just drop her off & pick her up on our way back!

    I fumed for 24 hours but then politely texted back and said no. I was not sad when she fired her whole staff (including me) in January.

  260. Spicy Tuna*

    I had a job that I absolutely hated for myriad reasons. It was in a small regional office (about 25 people) of a large, multi-national corporation.

    I had gotten another job but it had security clearance and required an extensive background check, so my new boss told me not to put in my notice at my current job until the background check was cleared.

    While I was waiting for the background check to be completed, my current job was having a computer system upgrade (software and hardware) that had to take place over the weekend so as not to interrupt work. In order for the upgrade to be fully completed over the weekend, the work was taking place continually from Friday at 5PM until Sunday whenever it was finished.

    Because I was the only person in the office that wasn’t married or a parent, I was “volunteered” to babysit the workers. I didn’t have to do anything to assist with the upgrade, I just had to be present to open the door for the contractors and keep an eye to make sure they didn’t open any file cabinets or steal people’s personal items.

    I was told to bring a sleeping bag, snacks and my own entertainment (books and movies, this was before Netflix) and sleep in the conference room. I cannot believe I actually camped out at the office for an entire weekend when I had a viable job lined up. I think the only reason why I didn’t say no was because I had a really hard time finding a new job (this was just a few months post 9/11) and I was so worried that something would go wrong and the other offer would be pulled.

    1. AVP*

      They expected you to sleep there?? In a sleeping bag?? That one might win!

      Please tell us that the new job eventually came through.

  261. Raedon*

    I wrapped up my graduate degree in architecture in 2009, graduating into the worst economy in a generation. The best jobs available were very low paying, temporary internships. I was actually pretty lucky to land an internship that paid actual money (though less than min. wage) and at a prestigious firm, at that.

    I worked 70+ hour weeks, on a university building project. A lot of that time spent working different schemes to plug into a large-scale model that was in my workspace (duh… I was working on it).

    The model was too large to move, so client presentation meetings were held in my workspace, so that the client could see how the different schemes looked in the model. BUT… because I was just a lowly intern (albeit one with a masters degree and plenty of experience) I was not permitted to officially attend the client meetings. The client was not supposed to know that I existed.

    And YET, there was no where else for me to work, so I had to remain at my desk during these meetings. So the situation was this: the principal, who had almost no involvement in the actual design, would present MY work to a client, inches from where I sat at my desk. But I was supposed to pretend I had nothing to do with it all. I was not introduced and I was not permitted to speak or even appear to be paying attention to these meetings.

    I couldn’t officially be “at” these meetings, but I was expected to get coffee and pastries for them.

    It was a really demeaning experience. I had to do a lot of deep breathing exercises to get through this job and I made it just barely through the minimum amount of time I had agreed to do, just to protect my reputation in the field. I declined to extend the internship when they asked me to.

    I guess the thoughts I was supposed to be ecstatic to have a “job” at a prestigious architecture firm in the middle of a recession. But it was a completely miserable experience and really soured me on architecture (I’ve since left the field altogether).

  262. queerforcryptids*

    This wasn’t me necessarily, but was for the program I was in. I used to be a crisis mental health worker in a mobile crisis program for folks with developmental disabilities: meaning that if someone was having a crisis, you could call us, we would come out, de-escalate if possible, or accompany them to the hospital for further evaluation. I have to emphasize that this was CRISIS work. Like, imminent harm, property destruction, serious mental health issues, what have you. We got our fair share of people calling cause their teen wouldn’t get out of bed or someone was cursing, but the essence of our job was: Got Crisis? We get in, work our magic, get out.

    One weekend, we got a crisis call for a teen with autism, which was already a disaster, from the dad insisting we drive him in our car (which we could not do, because we weren’t EMTs or police) to demanding to see a neurologist at 11pm on a Saturday in the ER. Well, come Monday, we all get sat down and are told that the Powers That Be (the state agency that ran our program) had decided to provide this kid and his parents pretty much 24 hour support, excepting when he’s at school. That meant that we were at the home with him while he wasn’t in crisis and even would be at the home OVERNIGHT just case the kid had a crisis. Turns out, the parents were lawyers and involved in several charities and non-profits and had absolutely thrown their weight around.

    My coworker Ann did the first shift. The next day, I asked her how it was. She said, “Oh, I took him and his mom to the grocery store and to the park and then watched him as he did homework and was ignored otherwise. I love using my Master’ degree to be a glorified Uber driver/bodyguard/accessory.”

    We staffed this family for THREE WEEKS. The amount of overtime we got was astronomical; I know one coworker who was working close to 60 hours each week. I guess the PTB finally put their foot down, because we stopped having to do it, but that was definitely one of the reasons why I left that job.

  263. Evita Purrrr-on*

    I ran the social media for a site with many branches; once, Facebook rolled out a (simply cosmetic) business page update, and a few of our sister branches received it before us. My horrible boss was fuming mad and demanded I “call Facebook” and ask why our branches got it before us. I tried explaining that 1) you can’t “call” Facebook and 2) that it was a random rollout, and we’d receive ours soon, but she wasn’t having it. So I told her I left a message for them. Luckily she forgot about it the next week.

  264. FrivYeti*

    I’ve certainly had my share of boringly unreasonable ones (managers asking me to sweep up the street outside because leaves on the street make people not want to park and enter the shop, the manager who was convinced that we should buy a rolodex to store office keys in because it cost less than a keybox, etc.) but the most extravagantly unreasonable thing a manager ever asked me to do was help him tell people about a fake employee’s suicide.)

    (Obviously, serious CW for suicide below, with the important note that no one was actually hurt or died.)

    See, when I first started working at this place (a very small business with just the owner (I’m going to call him Alan) and a handful of part-time staff) the owner let me know that if anyone called asking for Doug, I should tell them I’d go and get him, and then go and get Alan. Alan explained that businesses with two owners were seen as more respectable, so he’d faked up a business partner and introduced himself to some of his suppliers on the phone as Alan and to others as Doug.

    This seemed like a really complicated and low-reward scam to me, but I was young and I needed the job, and it also seemed pretty harmless. So I went along with it. And people did call asking for Doug, and I put them through to Alan, and it worked out.

    But eventually Alan also decided that this was a really complicated and low-reward scam, so he decided to retire Doug. But he didn’t just have his fake persona leave. No, he told me that if anyone called asking for Doug, I needed to tell them Doug was dead. Doug had stepped in front of a moving subway. Alan was very broken up about it, but he was pushing through, and he’d rather not talk about Doug any more because it brought up so many bad memories.

    I was… pretty horrified. But I went along with it, because I couldn’t see an out. Fortunately, I was mostly off the phones by then, so I only had to tell one person about Doug’s tragic passing, and I mostly just mumbled something and passed the phone to Alan, who went into full detail.

    That job was just a bundle of red flags, but mostly extremely weird ones.

    1. AnotherLibrarian*

      Wow, this is like someone read the Importance of Being Earnest and took it too seriously.

      1. FrivYeti*

        To be honest, the extent of Doug’s biography that I knew was “is Alan’s business partner”. It’s possible that Alan fleshed it out more; he may have had a whole creative writing exercise going. But I never met any of the people who knew him as Doug in person, only briefly on the phone, so I didn’t get much extra information.

  265. AnOtterMouse*

    Once upon my early 20s, as a research assistant, I was tasked with bringing breakfast to my grand-boss’s NYC apartment. She (60s) and her fiance (80s) answered the door in silk robes- and pretty clearly nothing else. I was invited in to join them but, uh, politely declined. I managed to not scratch my eyeballs out of my head until I made it into the elevator. Ughhhhh.

  266. Xakeridi*

    Drink scotch with the president of our small company, in his office, at 11 am. To be fair he was not trying to be sexual in any way. He was lonely and didn’t understand why we all hated him. I happened to be a popular member of staff. His raging drug issues and the fact that he got the job when our owner wanted to tank the business to take a tax loss were a large part of the reason.

  267. Just @ me next time*

    I worked at a big box office supply store when I was in University. They fired a couple of people right after the busy back-to-school season, so we were understaffed, plus the store was undergoing renovations, so everything was a huge mess and none of the products were where they were supposed to be.

    One Sunday, I had to work for four hours alone on the aisles before someone came in to relieve me for a break. I had been trying to help a woman find a product that we definitely had in stock but was nowhere to be found and I was feeling frazzled and ready to snap. When my coworker started his shift, he took pity on me and offered to take over helping the customer. I walked over to the customer service counter and told my manager that I had been working for four hours straight with no break, so I was going to take a 45.

    I had only been in the lunch room for a couple minutes when the phone rang. When I answered, it was my manager calling to tear me a new one for how rude and disrespectful I had been. My crime? Letting a customer hear that I had been working for four hours without a break.

    I ended up giving my notice on my next shift. There were a lot of other things going on contributing to that (my poorly managed mental health, school-related stress, and an ugly breakup with another coworker), but that phone call with the manager was the last straw.

  268. eee*

    This is small compared to some of these other stories but still grinds my gears! The company I’d worked for since graduation had been a good place to work for a while…then it wasn’t. Frog in boiling pot situation. Slowly the other people in my role were leaving for greener pastures, and at a certain point I noticed we stopped replacing them, and my workload was getting higher. I mentioned this to my boss (the head of the department) several times–“hey, my workload is getting really high since Kevin, Stacy, and Bob left. We’re hiring replacements for them, right?” and always got a “there’s actually not enough work to hire replacements!” I was working like, 60 hour weeks at this point, for a low-paying job where the main perk was flexible scheduling and a light workload, in the middle of a pandemic, and having to actively strategize with my boss week-to-week to figure out which of the things on my increasingly long to-do list I could safely de-prioritize. All throughout, I kept mentioning my high workload and got told by my boss that I was doing an amazing job juggling everything and that I was a shoo-in for a huge promotion at the end of the year.
    End of the year rolls by, and to be honest I wasn’t expecting a huge promotion but at least a little bit of a raise. In my end of year review, my boss takes a list of the 3 things we both decided I would not prioritize (that eventually got reassigned to other people with more time), and told me that I had actually done a really bad job managing my time that year, as evidenced by these 3 things that I had not done. I rather shocked, pointed out that he had told me to not work on those things as they were all internal and had no real deadlines. He kind of breezed past this and brought up two incredibly minor, internal-only mistakes I had made that year. Think “sent this email to a co-worker without actually attaching the attachment” moments, nothing that wasn’t quickly and easily corrected once it was noticed. He mentioned this type of sloppy work wasn’t acceptable. Again, I was pretty dumbfounded, and actually had nothing to say in response to this. Next, he moved on to the “unreasonable thing” portion: where he then criticized me for not volunteering for more work. “You need to be more proactive volunteering to take on work! In meetings this year, people mentioned that a task would be floated as needing volunteers and you wouldn’t volunteer.” Again, dumbfounded, I reminded him of my high workload, and the fact that he had brought up that I had apparently been making mistakes in my work, and that several pieces of work hadn’t gotten done due to my high workload and our prioritization. I rebutted that the reason I hadn’t volunteered to take on more work was because I was stretched incredibly thin, and was only getting everything done by working overtime, not taking vacation, etc.
    After the holidays, he let me know he’d been thinking a lot about my comments, and really took to heart what I said. Not like we were going to revisit my raise/promotion, but he’d really thought about it! Well I’d also taken stock of our conversation, and decided I was going to do the absolute bare minimum of work (still an acceptable amount, but not a moment over 40 hours) and throw myself into job searching. A month later, I accepted another job that paid literally twice as much, with less stress, and more interesting work. A month after I left, I found out his last direct report had either quit or been fired a week after I quit. Within the course of 4 months, all of his direct reports had either quit or been fired.

  269. SawbonzMD*

    Between sophomore and junior year of college, I worked as a bank teller. One day, a woman came in to, among other things, cash her government check. The thing is, I never actually saw the check in the pile of stuff she handed over to me. She started complaining to me that I’d lost her check while I told her that, no, I never had her check. She left in a huff.

    The next day, the branch manager came over and told me she’d gotten a complaint about me losing a government check. I told her, once again, that I’d never laid eyes upon this elusive check. Apparently she didn’t believe me because she made me go to the basement of the building, find the bank’s trash from yesterday, locate the bag from my teller station and search it for a check.

    After an hour of mucking about in spilled coffee, used kleenex, discarded gum and who knows what else, I told her that, no, there was no effing check there. (well, I left out the effing part)

    I should have walked out, but I really needed the money.

  270. Still Queer, Still Here*

    I have so many, but the one that comes to mind:
    I left public school teaching after the 2020-2021 school year, like so many. The main catalyst for that was this situation. In August of 2020, right as school was starting, one of the other teachers in my department (Jane) and I realize that there must have been a scheduling snafu. We both taught similar courses, and were each meant to teach 5 class periods that year. Instead, she had been assigned 6, and I had been assigned 4. Jane was having to teach 2 different courses within the same class period, and I had an extra planning period. The admins refused to rectify the situation (it was such an easy fix to change the teacher name and classroom on one of Jane’s classes; no schedules would need to be changed) because… They needed me to perform a job that was absolutely and completely outside of my training and job description. They told me and one other teacher with a less-than-full schedule that we were obligated to work together to perform state-mandated evaluations of students who needed academic & behavioral interventions, and complete paperwork and conferences in a way that is seriously mandated by the state. Because an extra 50 minutes of prep time during the day meant that we had time to perform a job that would easily take us each 20 hrs/week. We were also both wildly unqualified; it’s practically mandated that this job was done by a psychologist. I’m not sure how they got away with it, but we ended up doing it. In the middle of a pandemic. While also teaching in-person and online concurrently.

    Towards the end of the school year, I was told if I stayed, I would be expected to continue doing extra jobs because enrollment was down. This was after I had already signed my contract for the 2021-2022 school year. I went out, found another job, and quit in July without much fuss (I have an awesome job now with amazing benefits). We’re right-to-work, so teacher contracts don’t really have teeth. There’s a clause that makes it really clear that either party can withdraw at any time. So I did. A month or so after the new school year started, I got a call from HR telling me that they were rejecting my resignation and I had to come back, or there would be legal and professional ramifications. I rightfully told them that I fulfilled the terms of my contract, had a lawyer send a letter telling them that they really CANNOT do that, and have been living my best life with my new job since. A somewhat satisfying solution :)

  271. Dorothy Zbornak*

    My first job in the industry, I was in my mid-20s. One morning one of my bosses walked into my office and said I needed to give Big Boss a ride to the airport. He framed it as “We’ve all had to do it at one time or another.” Um, okay. The difference there is that I make $40k and you make $180k, so me doing it makes it feel more like being a chauffeur for my boss rather than giving a colleague a ride to the airport as a favor, but fine.

    Big Boss comes into my office when it’s time to go and says, well actually, I’m going to drive both of us to the airport in my car and then you will be responsible for driving my car home and parking it at my house (he lived a walking distance from work). Like…. what??? He had a REALLY NICE car. I had an ’06 Camry, and this was in 2014 or something so it certainly wasn’t new. I’m kind of proud that I put my foot down and said, “I’m happy to take you to the airport, in my car, but I don’t feel comfortable driving yours.” He took it in stride but the request itself was so bizarre to me.

    Though I recall as I tell this story that I actually did end up driving his car and parking it at his house at one point, but I think it was a few years later under different circumstances. I think it was a closer trip.

    1. Mitford*

      Another story from my fund raising days was when I worked in Brooklyn, NY. I did not have a car in NYC (no need, and it’s a tremendous hassle). My boss decided that my assignment for homecoming one year was to take the senior vice president’s company car, which was a Cadillac the size of a small yacht, home with me the night before homecoming so I could pick up an elderly alum who was being honored that year. He lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so I’d have to drive from my home on Staten Island to the Upper West Side then over to the school in Brooklyn, in a ginormous luxury car, having never driven anywhere in the city before. Plus, as a true child of the suburbs in another state, I couldn’t parallel park to save my life. One of the reasons he picked me for this was that I had a driver’s license, unlike the employees who were native New Yorkers and didn’t.

      I said no, because the very thought of it terrified me, and it came up in my performance evaluation that year. To their credit, several people in the office stood up for me and told him he was being unreasonable.

  272. chibrusu*

    Guy I worked with was responsible for our e-mail server among other things. One morning he was told to go to the CEO’s house to do PC support for the CEO’s entire family (two or three kids plus wife). This was a somewhat regular thing, but this time, the guy didn’t come back.

    The e-mail server went down. I called him. Turns out he was about to leave when the CEO’s wife told him she needed him (a guy she’d never met before that morning) to stay & babysit the youngest kid for a few hours. Entire company was unable to e-mail until the wife came back.

  273. Not Gonna Tell Ya*

    One fall in my very early 20s, while working for a small family business (where a lot of the family also worked) I got pregnant for the first time. Unfortunately I miscarried a couple days before Christmas. My doctor scheduled a D&C to clean things out, but it was the holidays and took some time to get it done so I went to work everyday as usual. The day before my surgery, my boss called me in and asked me to work the day of the actual surgery so that my coworker (her daughter) wouldn’t have to miss her lunchtime exercise class. There were zero cares that I lost a baby, or that I had come to work everyday while dealing with severe, painful contractions from the miscarriage. I said no.

  274. Mantis Tobaggan, MD*

    A Medieval Studies prof I RA’ed for while doing my Master’s insisted I use specific pens she supplied for doing copy-edits on a bibliography. The bibliography had been printed out using regular printer ink on regular paper, and the pens were just mid-range ballpoint pens (about $5 for a pack of 2) you can get at any office supply store. The insistence on specific pens was weird but I shrugged it off. Anyway, when I returned the copy-edits and her “special pens,” she accused me of using the pens for personal use because the “ink was too low” and insisted I go out and replace the pens.

    She also made me read the bibliography out loud to her, including reading out every individual piece of punctuation, and saying “space” for every space.

  275. YL*

    This was at an unpaid internship. I was working with an artist. The day comes to hang his show at the gallery. He brings his miniature pinscher puppy. The artist had a degenerative disease (I forget what it was called)–he was forgetful but still had motor skills. The puppy was his “service dog”–cough pet cough. The puppy was causing all sorts of trouble because it was 1) teething and 2) a puppy.

    The artist paid for day care at a local Pet Smart that was near the gallery, but he doesn’t want to leave and drop the puppy off because he “needs to be at the gallery.” He was actually refusing to do anything–even just laying out the work and deciding where things go–until the gallery staff gave him 100% attention. The staff had other admin stuff to do and told him to start with layout because its his work/vision and he gets they final say not them.

    Finally, he decides to let me bring the puppy to day care. I would have done anything to not be there. I was already planning on telling him that was going to be my last day. This puppy is scared of shadows. I think because he was carried a lot–he couldn’t walk on ground for a long time until he got his shots. I was walking him, he’d walk into a shadow and get scared and stop walking. Eventually, I ran out of treats to get him walking and I have to carry the puppy the rest of the way. We get to the store and the puppy pees in the store, like in an aisle. Sorry to the Pet Smart employees who had to help me clean. I get him to the day care and they can’t let me drop off the puppy because I’m not on the approved list of people who can drop him off. They have to call the artist’s wife for an ok. Wife okays it, thank goodness.

    I don’t know how that dog is doing now, but he deserved better than being a token service animal. IDK how that artist was even married. I guess she had some sort of fantasy of being married to an artist or the artists had some other social clout. The wife was clearly the breadwinner in that relationship. He was so annoying and bragged about seducing prior interns. I don’t even know how he got any gallery to work with him. I actually bumped into him once or twice over the years and we just ignore each other because we both know there’s no point in pleasantries.

  276. Throwaway_001*

    I like kids. My boss knows this. I am also a woman in leadership at a company that is very fond of patting itself on the back for having so many women in leadership positions, which would be great if the women weren’t also typically expected to organise events, make being at work a fun place to be, etc. But I digress!

    During one particularly hectic day, my boss tells me we will have a special visitor – his admittedly very cute toddler. Sure, great, hope it won’t be too annoying for the people you’re working against a deadline with today, which thankfully wasn’t me.

    …as it turns out, his idea was to have me entertain his kid. Kid was deposited by my desk without even a toy for amusement him. I had to scramble to pull up paper and highlighters; thankfully a few of my colleagues saw came by to join in from time to time.

    The real kicker? The reason the kid was at the office was because… his daycare was closed due to active COVID cases.

  277. MidwestMark*

    Out of college, as an actor willing to take on any “theatre” job, I worked for a non-profit educational touring theatre company. When we weren’t on the road, staying in the cheapest motels, waking up at 4am, eating from a cooler full of apples and peanut butter for the week, and performing drug prevention plays in the outskirts of the state, we were in their sad office space required to do OSTs or “office support tasks” (read, busy work).

    Once the lead there didn’t have an OST for me to do. So instead of letting me go or just relaxing with a book for once in my existence there, she said I should go to the company housing (the housing the provided for actors moving from other parts of the country and couldn’t find a place to live) and vacuum and clean. As a kid out of college I was still a ‘yes man’ to everything, but I remember this being one of the first times I, nearly in tears, put my foot down and said no. The people who lived there were responsible for cleaning it, not me. She backed down.

    A few years later, a friend who actually stuck around at that awful company said the house was condemned it was so dilapidated and unkempt.

  278. MissDisplaced*

    I guess this isn’t as bad as some people’s, but basically lie to clients about delivery.

    I once worked for a company undergoing financial difficulties. We produced printed products for customers, and they were all very late because the company could not afford to pay the printers. I was told to lie to these customers and blame the delays on the printers (effectively throwing the printer under the bus) instead of admitting the fault was our own. Sometimes it is possible to fudge this a “little” bit, because printers may shift a run slightly for your job, but it’s usually just a few days to a week delay at best. We were 3 months late delivering! I had one customer demand to know who our printer was, and I told them. Well, they promptly called the printer who explained why were were 3 months late due to our lack of paying them. I refused to lie like this again knowing some jobs were still sitting in my office waiting to be sent to print, and needless to say I didn’t last much longer at that job.

  279. Former EA*

    I worked briefly as an executive assistant/project manager at a University. My boss’s *husband* demanded that I forward all my phone calls to a coworker when I went to lunch (rather than having it go straight to voice mail.) He did not like leaving voice mail. He wanted to speak to her right away. He did not, however, want to call *her* office phone, nor her cell phone.

    I was the most junior staff there–so it wouldn’t really have been appropriate for anyone else to be fielding my calls and taking messages for me. (I managed a nation-wide program and 99% of my incoming calls were related to that.) Also most of us took lunch at the same time, so there was no one around anyway.

    My boss brought this up in my annual review as a point against me. (She also eventually tried to prevent me from leaving my desk during the work day. Including pee breaks. And then there was the “sex toy” email. And the personal medical appointments. And…well, lots of things. She was a trip. I got out after a year.)

  280. Nethwen*

    Does being expected to vacuum nightly with a vacuum that regularly shocked the user count? And then being looked at like a troublemaker when I refused to use that vacuum?

    Longer story:

    I was in an entry-level non-exempt position, my first full-time career job. My boss told me to read a prescribed number of books (I forget the exact number), but to do it off the clock. In order to comply, I spent hours daily and almost all weekend, off the clock, for weeks, completing this work assignment.

    Being my first “professional” job, I didn’t know the jargon, what was normal, or anything about the purpose of HR or who to ask for help, but this felt off. My coworkers flatly refused to get involved, even though they, also non-exempt, were given the same assignment. I said to my boss that since this was a work assignment, it seemed that we should be allowed to complete it during work time.

    My boss responded that they expected us to dress professionally, but didn’t give us time off to go shopping and this was the same thing.

    I called the state labor board, but didn’t know what they would do and couldn’t afford to loose my job and I knew I would be retaliated against if anyone official contacted my boss. I didn’t know what the options would have been when that happened, so I was very vague with the DOL. Naturally, they couldn’t advise me when I wouldn’t give them enough details that they could understand the situation.

    I completed the task while ramping up my job search.

    Then my boss wrote a PR piece proclaiming how they had “challenged” us to do this thing that lead to professional development. The article suggested that participation was voluntary and weren’t they such a great leader for giving us the opportunity. From my perspective, there was no voluntary challenge; it appeared to me to be a direct order and I needed to keep my paycheck, so I complied.

    1. Meghan*

      I would have made that vacuum mysteriously break. Like, whoops, gotta buy a new one! level of broken.

  281. Ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss*

    Oh, mine are so minor.

    One project manager wanted me to do her health insurance claims, since we sort of also handled her expense claims. I said to say no when I realized I would also have to manage knowing her SIN, etc.

    Then at a different place that was family-run, the wife of one of the owners, who had joined the work team, once asked me to call her kids’ doctor’s office to let them know she would be late. I had to figure who the hell this doctor was! Then a couple of weeks later, she strode in, said, the parking was too tight, she had no time and could I – the receptionist answering phones on the steady! – go and park her car. (It was a small parking lot, admittedly). I got the graphic designer to park it for me instead. He was not pleased. I was embarrassed at having to ask.

    On a related parking note, at a different place, to get to the indoor parking your office pass had to be configured correctly and this was not granted to everyone as the indoor parking was limited. “Important” people from out of town, or those who forgot their pass, would drive to the garage door, couldn’t get it and then would ask (again) the receptionist to come down six floors to open the garage for them. It was so entitled. Like, she’s not busy answering the phones or greeting people! (To compound the time loss issue and coverage issue, that receptionist had an elevator phobia so she would walk down six flights to let them in and then walk six flights back up to go back to her desk).

    My favourite, though, was from my first job. My boss was well known to have one-night stands. Well, his most recent one left behind her earrings at his place. Thankfully he knew exactly where she worked. So, he asked ME to return the earrings to her. Not sure why he couldn’t do it. I guess the night before wasn’t that special. She gave me an odd look when I dropped them off.

  282. Per My Last Email*

    I worked for a very small NFP focused on youth who wanted to learn the art of Teapot Making—about 5 staff members. My boss thought of herself as an “urban farmer” and had some small animals in her backyard. The workplace was dog friendly, which was fine. (I have a dog and everyone else did too.) However, one day, my boss brought a BABY GOAT to the office and put it in a playpen next to my desk. Everyone else was at an event for the day. At first, it was cute. Then she said she needed to run some errands and asked me to watch the goat. (Our mission had nothing to do with animals, farming, etc.) I was pretty new so I reluctantly agreed because I wasn’t sure what else to say, but I have absolutely no experience with caring for animals other than dogs and cats.

    Once she left, the goat started jumping out of the playpen and running around the office. She was gone for several hours and called to ask if I could put the goat in my car and drop it off at her house. When I said that I wasn’t confident I could do that, she sighed and told me just to “lock it in the bathroom” and she would come to get it.
    Needless to say, I was employed there for less than a year, and she thought of me as “not a team player” after the goat incident.

  283. Not using my name for this one!*

    All the same company:
    1. Asked to get holy water from the Church down the street (It was not a religiously affiliated company)
    2. Told to pull a page out of a signed contract, change the wording and “make it still fit so no one will no one will notice,” and then put the altered page back into each of the copies signed by both parties. (This is why you should initial every page of every contract you sign!)
    3. Be a cocktail waitress at the owners anniversary party.
    4. Clean the windows in a manager’s office
    5. Oh! And we had to pray at each meeting to thank Christ “For the benevolence he has granted upon [Owner] and [Owner’s Family].”
    6. Move a dead animal from the Owner’s Son’s car into the breakroom refrigerator
    7. Do the owner’s grandsons homework, and write his college admissions essay
    8. (Oh the memories keep coming back!) Call the state board and tell them to list one of the owner’s sons as a Lawyer. The son had failed the bar 5 times, but he was claiming to be an attorney and was doing the work of a qualified attorney and they thought a phone call was all it took to make him a qualified attorney.

    2. I Faught the Law*

      Why did they need the holy water? Vampire slayage?

      Also very curious about the dead animal.

    3. Not using my name for this one!*

      The dead animal was to be taxidermied. It wasn’t too big, about he size of a rabbit or a duck. It was to be stored in the breakroom fridge until the personal assistant could bring it to the taxidermist. It was wrapped up in a blanket, so I didn’t see it, but it was still gag worthy gross.
      The holy water was for the holy water basin that was at the entrance to the boardroom. This was a regular business with nothing to do with religion, but the owner wanted everyone to be Catholic, so people were to bless themselves with the holy water as they walked into the board room. If you’ve been to a catholic church, they have the basins at every entrance and you dip your fingers and make the sign of the cross as you enter the church. That’s what employees were directed to do.

      2. Tessie Mae*

        What?! Raised Catholic, and I know some super religious Catholics, but no one at this level of bonkers religiosity. This is nuts. Not to mention basically stealing from the church. Holy smokes.

        2. Three Pines Visitor*

          Haven’t noticed recently, but back in the day Catholic churches had dispensers (about the size of a small coffee urn) for parishioners to get holy water for their household holy water fonts (little quarter-sphere objects that were hung near the door/s of the house).

          The water was blessed during Holy Saturday services and (although I’ve never thought about this before) stored somewhere for the sacristan/custodian to use to refill the dispenser/urn (samovar?) as needed.

  284. Just an Employee*

    I once worked as an administrative assistant for a small historical Museum. The Museum was located near a shopping district and we would get a lot of walk-in traffic. It was the day after Thanksgiving and the Museum was closed for the holiday. The Executive Director wanted the main building opened and for me and another admin to staff the Admission desk. She wanted the lights on, the open sign on, etc… but we had to tell anyone that came to visit that the Museum was closed and we will re-open on Monday. The main building housed a gift shop, art galleries and restrooms, our ED said that visitors can’t use those spaces because we are closed.

    We had a couple of visitors that were annoyed that we were open but not open. I left shortly after that.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      Wait–why did the ED want you to open? Was there actual work for you to do, when you weren’t telling visitors that no, being ‘open’ was really just a practical joke?

  285. Goose*

    I did a lot of DIY Pinterest wedding prep for my boss back when I was in hospitality. I was actually invited to the wedding (we were all faaaaaamily) so I did get to see the results of my labor.

    Currently I work in a school, and I have a kid who asks me at least once a week to flush the toilet for them because they are afraid of the sound. No thanks!

  286. ArtsyGirl*

    I think I might have mentioned this before but I had the spouse of my grandboss (SoGB) demand that I travel 30 minutes to their home in the early AM to make sure a guest had turned off the lights and locked the doors of their guest house (which was on the property). I was an assistant to a visiting contract employee and he was given use of the grandboss’s guest house but he was insanely bad about turning off lights, straightening up, or even bothering to shut the front door – he was a man child and there are dozens of stories I can tell about his tenure. Anyway because I was his PA, SoGB blamed me for the messes despite the fact that I was not occupying the space. Since grandboss liked this contractor and kept inviting him to stay, SoGB’s solution was that each day I should drive in before 7AM and double check the space and straighten up after the contractor. Keep in mind grandboss had a housekeeper and cleaning service. I immediately went to my manger and luckily SoGB never contacted me again.

  287. Chilipepper attitude*

    IDK if babysitting counts as a job but it was for money and it was my first ever babysitting job. And there is a twist.

    I was 11 and got asked to babysit at the last minute for a family I knew. Mom was already out at a meeting and my dad was picking up the other dad to go to a meeting but their babysitter fell through. My dad said I could do it, I had 3 younger brothers.

    So I go and babysit the 9 year old, 7 year old, and 5 year old; its really just the 7 year old and 5 year old, no problems, right? I get there and realize there is a 3 year old too! I’m trying not to freak out that I am 11 and there are 4 kids, not 3. But its fine, I play with the 3 younger ones while the older one tries to do his homework.

    Then I think its bedtime and ask where their rooms are. I take the 3 year old to the room they tell me is his and I see a bed AND A FREAKING CRIB. You know, like a crib for a baby. There is A BABY SLEEPING IN THE CRIB!! The baby has been there the whole time and NO ONE TOLD ME!! If there had been a fire, I would not have known to get the baby. No one told me what the baby ate and I had no idea what to do. I had to call my mom for help and she had to come over to help me.

    1. Sleepless*

      I was asked to babysit by a total stranger on New Year’s Eve when I was 14. (Why me? Her regular babysitter was in my class. She was invited to the Big Party that all of the Cool Kids were invited to, so I assume she referred the lady to me because she knew I wasn’t invited to the Big Party.) The kids were a 4 year old and a 6 week old baby. The mom showed me a bottle and said “he’ll wake up about 8, give him this, the diapers are on the changing table. Here’s the 4 year old’s dinner. We’ll be back about 1 AM!”

      Incredibly enough, that is exactly how that went. The baby literally woke up, ate, needed changing, and went back to sleep. I had never changed a diaper, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. The 4 year old was quite cute and sweet, and mom had made the most delicious spaghetti sauce I had ever had. I babysat for them several more times over the next year or so, but it was many years before I realized how insane it was that this lady left her almost-newborn with a strange 14 year old and gave me virtually no instructions.

    2. Boof*

      OK I agree that’s pretty hideous and scary – who doesn’t tell the babysitter about THE ACTUAL BABY @-@

    3. SpaceySteph*

      But wait, I feel like there’s something missing here. You knew this family? Did you know they had 5 kids? Were the other 2 kids from a different family sleeping over for the night? Where did the two surprise kids come from I need to know?!

      1. Chilipepper attitude*

        I mean, yeah, I knew them. My dad knew the dad better because they both coached little league or something.

        But they lived a little out of walking distance so I only knew the 9 year old from the school bus and vaguely knew he had 2 younger brothers. I had no idea there was a 3 year old and my dad did not mention him or the baby (he probably did not pay much attention, its what dads were often like back then).

        I feel like I remember my mom saying, what, they have a baby!? It was maybe 6 months old I think.

      1. Chilipepper attitude*

        Exactly, or who hires a 14 year old to take care of a 6 week old?!

        In my case, I always wondered if the mom was horrified when she found out what my dad and her husband did.
        I think she came home to find me there and I only remember being mortified that I had to tell her that I had to have help from my mom.

    5. Bagpuss*

      My sister was once just handed a baby by a total stranger.It was after Princess Diana died, my sister was living on the route the cortège took so she and her housemate wandered out to see it pass.
      The woman with the baby apparently wanted to get nearer and just dumped the baby on my sister.

      (I mean, my sister is a teacher and likes babies but they didn’t know that, plus there were enough people around that it could have been quite tricky to locate her again if she’d wandered off… )

      My sister followed her and returned the baby with a strongly (& loudly) worded comment on why giving your infant to a random stranger was not appropriate.

      1. RebelwithMouseyHair*

        On a beach in Thailand, a young couple came over and asked if I could watch their (sleeping) baby while they went for a jet ski ride. They barely waited for me to say yes before they scooted off. I had actually started saying no, because my daughter had a temperature, and you never know in such places whether it might be something dangerous (We had chosen the most secluded part of the beach so she wouldn’t infect anybody). I sat there worrying that the baby would wake up, or that the young couple would have an accident while jet skiing, because nobody knew anybody’s names. Luckily they came back before the baby woke up, and I just told them they had been very irresponsible not to even swap names and numbers before taking off like that.

    6. Youth Librarian*

      Reminds me of when I started babysitting when I had just turned 12 – I always did group childcare at churches, not individuals at homes – and I was taking care of the kids of leaders for Awana (kind of like Sunday School but in the evening). Woman dumps off 5 kids, not wearing shoes (it was the middle of winter – in TX – but still), some of them still gnawing on bits of toast, and what I at first thought was a baby in a carrier seat. It was not a baby. It was a three year old with severe disabilities and her instructions were literally “call me if he has a seizure.” I found out later she ran a 24 hour daycare and only one of the kids was hers. To be fair, she was still in the same building, but I didn’t even know what a seizure would LOOK like! I was terrified of damaging the child – they could not even hold their head up – but I did eventually gather all my courage and take them out of the carrier seat and they never did have a seizure (that I recognized anyways).

  288. Bored IT Guy*

    – As a ride operator in a large theme park, I once had to cover a 1/4 mile long trail of vomit with absorbent powder. (That’s not really that awful. I do feel sorry for the custodian who then had to sweep it up, spray disinfectant, and avoid tour trams while doing that)

    – Working in a hotel on the property of a large family theme park, had a guest ask if I could arrange a prostitute for them. (I declined).

    – (this one isn’t all that unreasonable, just unusual) Had to jump start a golf cart, from another golf cart. The dead cart had a “gas pedal ignition”, so as long as the key was in, the engine (and movement) would start when you had your foot on the gas, and it’d shut off as soon as you took your foot off the gas. The battery was under the driver’s seat. So, we lined the 2 golf cards next to each other, hooked up the jumper cables, waited a minute, then both started driving at the same time. Once my cart started, I couldn’t stop (had to let keep the engine going, so the alternator could charge the battery a little), so I had to “stand up” (as much as I could in a golf cart), lift up the driver’s seat, unplug the jumper cables, then put the seat back down, and sit down, all the while steering and keeping my foot on the gas. It’s amazing that nobody was hurt.

  289. Cait*

    We fly in international candidates as part of our company’s educational program. We pay for any visa fees and hold their hand the whole time they’re applying… except for the interview and the visa processing. Once the visa application is submitted and they’re granted an interview at the US Embassy or Consulate, it’s out of our hands.
    One candidate was having a particularly hard time getting their visa approved and they needed it in order to make our interview within the week. My boss started badgering me to “just call the US Embassy and ask them to prioritize this person’s visa”. I kept trying to explain to her 1. I know no one at this embassy, 2. My asking them to put a rush on it would probably only be met with laughter, and 3. There’s no way the embassy is going to share confidential information with me when there’s no way for me to prove who I am. You don’t just call up an embassy, demand someone else’s visa application information and expect them to take your word that you’re from the host organization. Even then… it’s CONFIDENTIAL.
    But she wouldn’t stop haranguing me about it and was convinced if I just made this phone call the candidate would get their visa approved asap. I knew if I went chasing this pipe dream I would be wasting hours of my time so I pretended to call the embassy, “magically got through immediately”, and was told by a “very official person” that they “couldn’t give me the information”.

  290. Sharkie*

    Shave my head since I couldn’t guarantee that my thick curly/ wavy hair was going to be pin straight every day or that fly aways weren’t going to happen.

    I told him politely that if he thought non pin straight hair was unprofessional why would he consider me walking around with a shaved head professional.

    This was the same boss that flipped the corn hole board when he lost in a tournament and the same boss that freaked when the women on the team wore ties for a goofy team photo (there were 15 men and 5 women)

  291. I WORKED on a Hellmouth*

    Oh! I also once lost a job because I refused to lie to Oprah.

    They wanted me to write up a press release/pitch thing to send to Oprah’s show that would lie about Katrina-related charity work that the owner of a business that was our client did. Like, REALLY lie. I was not down for lying to Oprah. They were not down for employing someone who wouldn’t lie to Oprah. Farewell, job where I got to be paid for writing stuff!

      1. I WORKED on a Hellmouth*

        Oh yes. Not lying to Oprah was a deal breaker.

        The client of the company that I worked for was an MLM that specifically targeted women, and sold… um, naughty things. The owner of the MLM was a woman who liked to talk about “women helping women” and she wanted us to write copy lying about the aid she gave to New Orleans women impacted by Katrina. I… was not down for that.

    2. Campfire Raccoon*

      Your delivery is gold. “If it weren’t for that horse, I would have never made it in college.”

  292. Sleepless*

    I wasn’t exactly asked to do this, just put in this situation because the boss didn’t think it was important enough to prevent it. I came out of an exam room and the boss said matter of factly, “oh yeah, that’s the guy that grabbed [one of my predecessors, also a young female] by the lapels and shoved her up against the wall.” The others nodded, yeah, we remember that. We had to come in and tell him to leave.

    Yay. You got the guy to leave. Go you. But you did none of these things: call the cops, tell the guy never to come back, or tell me about this BEFORE I WENT IN A SMALL ROOM ALONE WITH HIM.

  293. Brian*

    I once taught English in another country at the elementary level. The school would rent apartments for us foreign teachers. When we got a new (American) director, he thought this was inefficient, and wanted to build dormitories on campus for the teachers. So we would live at work. We would never leave. He couldn’t figure out why we weren’t excited about this.

  294. I Am Not a Lawyer*

    I was asked to investigate what it would take to pursue a libel case over a news article that… did not mention her. At all. I am not a lawyer, and I wasn’t then, either.

  295. Fenny the Fed*

    Just out of grad school in the early 2000’s I worked for a small, extremely odd and dysfunctional non-profit/museum. My top stories are:

    The director would bring her cat in and let it run free throughout the offices and galleries, despite the fact that several staff members (including me) had allergies. I would sometimes have to find the cat at the end of the day and put it in a tote bag, which was how she transported the cat. She would also leave the cat in the museum when she went on vacation, and we would have to feed, water, and litter scoop for it as part of our regular duties.

    Director once halted a staff meeting because her coffee was cold and she wanted me to take it to the kitchen and re-heat it in the microwave. I was taking minutes at the meeting, so everyone had to wait for me to return to continue through the agenda.

    The curator would bring his dog to work – and then unleash it and let it roam through town during work hours, despite the dog having been captured by animal control several times. At one point, the curator gave me dog biscuits and told me that if I saw the dog in the parking lot, I should use the biscuits to lure it into the curator’s unlocked car (it was cool and raining, so leaving the dog in the car would not have been deadly).

  296. [name]*

    When my boss was in the hospital unexpectedly, she asked me to go to her house and bring her a change of clothes (including underwear)! I did it.

    Long version: My first job after college was for a tiny firm, basically the owner and me and sometimes a few other part-time people. It was boundary-blurring in many ways (and in hindsight pretty toxic, but this was my first job and I didn’t know any better). I was always the first person in the office and she would often call early in the morning, so when I got a call from her one morning it seemed totally normal… until I picked up and she said “[Name], I think I broke my leg.” Turns out she stepped off her front porch, slipped on the ice, and was lying on the sidewalk with the bone poking out of her leg :( Luckily she had already called 911 so I just stayed on the phone for a minute trying to distract her until someone nearby saw her and came over and stayed with her until the ambulance came. She was taken to the hospital, got out of surgery, and since she didn’t have any family in town, called me to ask if I could bring her a few things! I had been to her house before to pick up faxes when she was out of town since the backup fax line went to her house (why???), and it wasn’t far from the hospital, so I didn’t mind. But I tell you, never did I expect to be going through my boss’s underwear drawer…

    1. The Dogman*

      I don’t think any of that is unreasonable at all.

      That is just being a decent person to someone in need, and good on you for doing it.

  297. Agency Survivor*

    Allow my boss to “touch my legs,” because she said her hands itched when she touched her husband’s legs, and wasn’t sure if it was her hands being itchy or it was his legs. I said no. Same boss also gave me a big bag of clothes (all hers, used) because what I was wearing wasn’t office appropriate. She also sent a coworker to her (my boss’s) house during the day to get her a new pair of underpants. This was my first job out of college.

  298. many bells down*

    Twice while teaching I’ve been asked to deliberately lie to parents. “Tell them we don’t have a biter in the toddler room.” Uhhh we’ve got a kid who’s probably visibly scarred for life because of The Biter, that’s not gonna work.

    And there was the time that a parent told me she’d lost her driver’s license with her last DUI, so I informed the center director that legally we couldn’t allow her to pick up her kid, knowing that. Director looked me in the eye and said “I didn’t hear her say that and neither did you.” I quit a month later.

  299. 15PiecesofFlair*

    At my last company (a SaaS startup), my boss, who was the Founder and CEO, instructed me and a few of my subordinates to communicate with prospects, customers, and candidates under fake names. He went as far as to ask us to create fake LinkedIn profiles to use to message customers and prospects so we would look like a larger company. This long-standing practice only ended when a litigious employee threatened to sue on unrelated grounds which would have potentially exposed other wrongdoing in the process.

  300. NyaChan*

    While I was still a student, I interned at a law firm that specialized in part in Workers Compensation (big practice in our town because we had 2 international companies with multiple factories in range). When the ALJ was having hearings, all the local attorneys would gather in the lobby and go one after another into the hearing room when the case was called. My supervisor who is an attorney and bound by a code of ethics asked me to pretend to be a new associate at the law firm and tried to have me appear before the ALJ under that pretense. He reasoned that it was just a request for an extension and it wasn’t a state or federal court so it wouldn’t be a big deal for me to pretend to be an attorney. It is a VERY big deal and once he saw my horrified face he froze and started awkwardly laughing like “haha..just…just kidding! Of course that would be wrong”. Absolutely ridiculous.

  301. Campfire Raccoon*

    Circa 2005: Clean out my boss’ panic room and learn how to fire/maintain the gun in his desk “in case of an emergency”. My boss thought Barry Goldwater (long since dead) had put a hit out on him back in the 80s. The whole thing was ridiculous.

  302. Dragon_Dreamer*

    I was once ordered to remove viruses from a laptop that was visibly crawling with what an entomologist told me were bedbugs. This was at the Bent Metal Fastener. My sexist supervisor, the one who liked to bully me, had charged the customer for a 2 year, $400 virus removal package. He’d also put the laptop right next to another machine, belonging to a customer who LOVED to complain!

    I took a photo, sent it to my manager (who was off at a corporate meeting), and refused to touch it. He tried threatening me, while I unhooked it from power and the laptop lock and double bagged it. It promptly went into the back tech area. (We later had to triple bag it when it was found that one of the first two bags had mysteriously developed pencil sized holes!) The more he blustered, the more I threatened to call OSHA. Thankfully, the manager agreed with me. We refunded the customer, and “suggested” he buy a new one. The customer was not happy, the supervisor upped his bullying, but I still feel I won that day.

    Laptop tax (TW: bugs): https://imgur.com/K2xHuXW

    1. SpaceySteph*

      OMG I clicked the link. Why did I click the link?

      Also… TIL bedbugs can infest things other than upholstery. Shudder.

  303. Guenièvre*

    Mine isn’t *that* bad, but still : I worked at a call center and we provided legal information as a service to clients of an insurance company. Our boss went to the library, got a few books on some legal subjects, and asked us to photocopy the books (in between calls). We were lawyers working for a multinational insurance company (I know legal books are expensive, but with what they were saving by underpaying us, they could have bought them many times over!). I refused, citing IP laws. He never asked me again, but the newbies didn’t dare oppose him. Oh and for the 1.5 year I was there, we never consulted those books.

  304. Relax Relate Release*

    Not as ridiculous as some others but this was my first professional position and it did not end well.

    I had resigned my position as a school media librarian while the principal was out of the country. She showed up at my apartment at 7:00 a.m. (after I had been up most of the night packing to move) to demand that I not only convince another teacher to take the position but insist that I work the remainder of the summer, full-time and unpaid to train her and ready the library for the fall semester.

    Perfect example of why I resigned.

  305. Ali*

    Many months into a job that I performed well and with accolades, I was asked to remove my nose piercing because a quite senior male colleague had complained about it. I had just changed it from a silver stud to a red rhinestone stud, and I guess he didn’t like the new look.

    I somehow stood up to this perfectly, which I marvel at today. Not because I knew what I was doing…just the gumption of a 20-something who doesn’t know well enough to treat lightly in this kind of situation.

  306. Official Cat Lady*

    Okay…I still cringe when I think about this…and I was no teenager…I WAS middle age but desperate for a job. So my title was Executive Assistant at this really cool tech company…and all was good until
    ..I found out my extra duties included: making my boss breakfast EVERY morning…hard boiled egg, no yolk on English muffin, picking him up lunch every day..salad with 1 scoop tunafish and I ladle of salad dressing..which I got yelled at one day for trying to sneak in extra dressing, getting gas for HIS car when needed, (oh yeah, he drive past gas station on his way to work), learning how to use his cars GPS so I could program it for his business meetings, dropping off and picking up his personal dry cleaning, arranging his marriage anniversary trip with no input from him and him screaming at me when it wasn’t up to expectations, standing outside his office window knocking and pointing at my watch so he would know it was time for his next meeting…and the list goes on. I started looking for a job within days…but had to stick it out for 6 months. I wish I could chalk it up to the fact this person had never worked for anyone else..he started the company right out of college…but in reality, he was just a Glassboro. Sigh.

      2. CommanderBanana*

        I think they meant glassbowl, which is a way to type a**hole without getting snagged in filters. The advice columnist Carolyn Hax uses this term and it caught on with her regular commenters.

  307. Dolly Dagger*

    I was asked to completely copy a very large motorcycle manufacturer’s artwork. Specifically told “just trace it.” I did push back and said I only will after you speak to our lawyers about that.

  308. Dex*

    Years ago I worked for one of those places where you can haul your own belongings in a gigantic box truck without any kind of commercial licence or training. The manager of that location was some sort of former military person who didn’t believe any task couldn’t be done. He’d always respond with “find a way.”
    Once, he wanted us to change the lettering on the large sign outside. The sign had to be thirty feet off of the ground, and the one ladder we had wasn’t tall enough to reach it. He didn’t want to hear that it was physically impossible for us to even reach the damn sign and change the letters around. “Find a way.”
    As winds picked up from an approaching tropical storm, he expected us to back one of the big trucks up near the sign, put the ladder on up top of the slippery top of the truck, and just… hope workman’s compensation would cover our inevitable injuries?
    Ridiculous demands such as these are what led me to finally quit. The last straw was when he expected me to clean a bathroom that had been absolutely destroyed by some jerk who had come in and used to (walls, ceiling, everything covered with human waste.) I wasn’t a janitor, we didn’t have any kind of protective gear for that kind of situation, and I was done. I sure as hell wasn’t being paid well enough for that. He actually called me later, insisting that I was throwing away a huge chance, as if “retail truck rental” was the pinnacle of my career.
    (The place is still there, but he’s no longer the manager. From what I heard, he and the assistant manager were dealing drugs out of the office, and both eventually got arrested for it.)

  309. LivingTheDream*

    I’ve been in HR/recruiting for over 20 years. When I was an HR Assistant at the start of my career, I was responsible for interviewing and hiring for forklift drivers. One day, my boss the HR Manager, called me in to his office and said that “there are too many dark faces in the new hires” and that I needed to change what I was doing. I looked him in the eyes, stated I am hiring the most qualified candidates, and walked out of his office. I didn’t change what I was doing and never heard anything further.

  310. Orbital*

    When I worked as a civilian for a branch of the military, the department I joined had just recently had their admin retire. My very first day they were having what they called a “shredding party” and just willy-nilly shredding documents that had been in her desk. A few months later, after our funding had hit a dry spell for a while, I was tasked with emptying the safes in our area of “unnecessary documents.” This included scanning every single piece of paper into our classified computer system, put all of the documents into burn bags, and hauling them up two floors to the security department for disposal. The very first time I took a burn bag up, I got reprimanded because there was supposed to be a supplementary document for each bag that listed the documents being disposed of. I had never had training or guidance while doing this, so eventually the security team came down to our area and yelled at our manager and senior engineer. I ended up sitting in our secure area slowly feeding documents through the scanner for TWO WEEKS. I eventually brought some books to read while waiting for the scanner to finish. And, you know, a great use of a junior engineer’s time.

  311. Another Lawyer*

    I had an unpaid internship at a politician’s office when I was in college. One of my big projects for the summer was to coordinate and train volunteers for a big event. The office event coordinator (who was not my supervisor) used to make me come with her to a high-end department store to carry her shopping bags around.

  312. moneypenny*

    I worked for a patent attorney’s office and once I ran out of work, they asked me to scan all the old patents that were done before computer days. Ok, I said. Where’s the scanner?

    I was directed to the back room, in January, in Chicago, unheated with drafty gaps in the doors and windows. The only scanner they had was part of the copier/printer and every page was onion skin. They jammed and got ruined frequently, and because the company was too cheap to order a proper scanner, I had no choice but to do it that way. I had to open the scanner program, select the path where it should be saved, scan, and repeat for hundreds of pages. I did not last long at that job.

  313. BlackLodge*

    Many years ago I was temping at a US Postal Inspection Service office. One day, the senior agent decided he wanted to do an inventory of some technical equipment in the facility. One piece of radio equipment was located on the roof of the building. He insisted I go up so I could check it off the list. He failed to mention it was placed on a spire/tower structure that was only accessible by a rickety metal ladder. In the winter. With wind and blowing sleet. In my business professional clothes/shoes. Why I didn’t say Hell No and call the temp agency eludes me to this day. The same agent also thought it was acceptable for a neighbor to steal my cat and release it in the wild because it was pooping in his garden (that there were a number of feral cats in the neighborhood didn’t seem to matter).

  314. NotAnExpert*

    I was an office temp and got assigned to a very fancy private school for boys in the campus facilities department. After several months of increasing responsibilities, they asked me to create all the fire exit maps for both their campuses, develop the full plan for a active shooter lock-down, and manage and execute their very first fire, tornado, and lock-down drills. This was in 2005. Long story about why they hadn’t done fire drills before this, but it all had to do with state regulations.

    I should be clear: my education was in Political Science and my previous work experience was in congressional offices. There was no way my mid-20s self should have been given this responsibility. I did it, the drills went well and when I happened to be back there for something else, the maps I made were still hanging on the wall! It was interesting and probably could have launched a whole career in school safety.

  316. Justy J*

    I worked in an office with questionable building conditions. One time when I was off work, my manager texted me with a photo of the office – the entire ceiling collapsed. I mean, it was a disaster scene. His manager made him come in to clean it up and I was asked to do the same. Needless to say, I said No and quit shortly after.

    At another job, two weeks in and eating chips on break. My manager demanded that I let him feed me those chips. I protested, he insisted, this went on for a few minutes until I walked away. Happened every time after that whenever I would eat. I complained to HR and was scolded “Who do you think you are? You haven’t even been at this job for three weeks and you’re coming to us with complaints about your manager? He has a family” and yes, I quit this one too.

    1. Zweisatz*

      Feeding… you… chips. Your resignation must have come as a huge surprise (not even sarcasm, could imagine they lived in an alternate reality).

  317. overcaffeinatedandqueer*

    Been working in COVID relief related areas.

    Not gross or strange, but I was asked to contact someone even though they were hospitalized with said COVID. I waited as long as I feasibly could and got to the client when they were on the mend enough to take calls and sign things.

  318. NerdyKris*

    I never call out. I’m just lucky like that and never get sick. One time during a gas shortage I called out because I didn’t have gas. My coworker/sort of lead who constantly called out scolded me for not having gotten gas the previous night after work at 1am in a sketchy area and said I should siphon the gas from a neighbor’s car.

  319. Ally McBeal*

    I really hope I’m not doxxing myself, but I used to work in NFP communications in NYC. We had a change in leadership, and the new president didn’t like our department head (who’d been hired a few months before new prez joined), so they replaced the dept head with a 30-year-old who’d never done nonprofit comms before. This new VP called me into her office a couple weeks after starting and gave me an assignment: get her upcoming wedding into the NY Times Vows section. The wedding was 10 days away, which made the assignment completely impossible due to the NYT’s production timeline. And, of course, it was completely unethical to ask me to use company time and resources to promote her personal life. Fortunately, both my direct boss and another colleague who had direct knowledge of the NYT production timeline were able to talk her down. This was not our first red flag about new VP, nor was it our last.

  320. Msgnomers*

    I went on my first business trip out of state with my boss. Boss proceeds to get very drunk the night before our meeting with clients. He tries to kiss me, touched me inappropriately, tells me he’s going to get me pregnant- all sorts of gross stuff. We’re both married and so absolutely not and get a Lyft back to the hotel.

    The next morning, boss is unreachable. I give up and go to client meeting on my own and do the presentation solo. Many hours later, I’m finished and find him as he’s getting kicked out of a bar. I learn he was in a fiat fight the night before that he started. He has lost his rental car and cell phone. We walk around for hours trying to find them, stopping occasionally for him to randomly remove articles of clothing and pass out on strangers’ front yards, while I helplessly try to rouse him as I walk around in heels lugging a heavy suitcase.

    Eventually, I give up, drop him off at the airport, wish him luck, and proceed to take the two days of PTO I had scheduled and drive to a National Park 4 hours away.

    You would think I’d be free, but no. Boss has somehow arranged a ride to the same town I am in and calls me and demands I give him a ride back to the city we were just in, because he now knows where his other phone and rental car are. I stupidly let myself get bullied into this. We drive back, 4 hours. He’s drinking, still, climbing into the backseat and refusing to wear a seatbelt until I pull the car over and refuse to move until he gets it together.

    Eventually, we get to prior city. I leave him and drive back to my destination, just in time to get to bed at 2am and get up early to catch my flight the next morning.

    HR was told all of this. They did nothing. I worked on setting boundaries and refused to travel alone with him again.

    There was another series of incidents in which I had to call the police to do a wellness check at his house, drive him to rehab, and somehow became his emergency contact there.

    Anyway, I accepted an offer at another company yesterday and I can’t wait to leave this insane place.

  321. BlueStarGirl*

    I temped in the front office of a cemetery for a year and mostly it was a very respectful, somber place, but two particularly bonkers calls I received spring to mind.

    1) A lot of the calls we got were from people doing genealogy research and wanting to confirm an ancestor was interred in our cemetery and we had software that could help us do that. So a guy calls me, tells me he thinks our grandmother is buried in the cemetery, and can I help him find her. Sure, I say, what’s her name? He’s adopted, he doesn’t know her name. Okay, that makes things harder, but not a deal breaker. What about just her first name on the off-chance it’s unusual enough to find her? He doesn’t know. Hmm, maybe I can pull the info with just year of death? He has no idea. Lot owner? Nope. So this guy literally just called a cemetery, said, “Is my grandma buried there?” and expected an answer.

    2) the Friday before Memorial Day I get a call at 4 p.m. from someone wanting to do a 21-gun salute at their relative’s grave on Monday and wanted to make sure cemetery was okay with it. Obviously, we were not. You need city permits and someone to perform the salute and prep time, it’s a whole big thing. I politely told the caller this and hung up. A few minutes later they call back. They had the militia all lined up to perform the salute, could they just come in and do the 21-gun salute on Monday real quick? Again, no. (Keep in mind, Memorial Day is the most popular day of the year for Americans to visit cemeteries so not only are they wanting to shoot guns in an active cemetery, they’re wanting to shoot guns in a CROWDED cemetery.) They call back again. They’ve confirmed with the militia group that they use blanks in the salute, so surely that will be fine? NO. They ask to speak to my manager – this is the Friday afternoon before a long weekend so most of the higher ups were long gone for the day. I transferred the call to the only VP left on the premises, the VP of finance and let him tell the caller for the fourth time that no he couldn’t do an impromptu 21-gun salute in the cemetery.

  322. LMM*

    I worked for a highly unreasonable, irrational little man once upon a time who claimed to be unable to read anything on a screen. Mind you, we worked for a major national newspaper. So screens were part of the deal.

    He asked me to print his emails. All ~2000 of them that he received daily. It took hours, killed untold numbers of trees, and I had to do it at one specific computer near his desk because he so overtaxed the printer that the company removed his printer from the network and made him pay for his own paper.

    And I did this for TWO YEARS because it was in the middle of the Great Recession and I was told it was printing emails or being let go.

    This same small man also once yelled at me for sending an email from an iPhone (which contained the little “this email was sent from my iPhone” tagline. Because he said it was rude and did not show enough deference to communicating with him that I would write him an email on the fly from my phone.

    I never did that again and removed that auto tagline from my phone, and even 10 years later, I wonder – does anyone ACTUALLY care about this? Except him?

    1. LMM*

      I should add that later that year, he sent me an email from HIS iPhone, to which I replied that he must have been very busy to do a thing like sending an email from an iPhone on the train! He also removed the tagline after that.

    2. SpaceySteph*

      I dont have the “sent by my phone” tagline and haven’t in many years, but I would think sending an email via your phone indicates that you’re jumping to respond aka being extra deferential. But people who care about such things are likely to have odd notions of respect. (Like the LW from a few days ago who thinks their employee should just keep working for no pay rather than make a fuss)

  323. dude, where's my cheese*

    Wait in line at the Apple store with my boss’s phone for an hour – unpaid internship for college credit, ie internship was basically paying for the experience of waiting in line at the Apple store. This was… not topically relevant to the internship.

  324. Library Lady*

    I work in public libraries, and I’ve gotten some VERY…erm…interesting requests from patrons while I was working. The one that stands out the most though was the time a patron left a series of rambling voicemails asking for me (by name!) to come bail him out of jail. And the kicker was that I wasn’t even at work when he called, so by the time I came in, my coworkers were all coming up to me like “Well, did you bail him out?!?!” and I had no earthly idea what they were talking about.

    (I did not bail him out.)

    1. Anon librarian*

      I work in a public library. In case others did not know, we get all the public with all the questions. Mostly we really help people and it is rewarding. But we also have patrons whose intentions are not so pure. One day I m helping a patron who appears to have mental health issues (he says he has invented many things but the government stole them all from him and he sends 50 page letters to various officials to get the money the govt owes him, I think it is in the billions now). One day he asked for help with google maps and the satellite option. As I am teaching him to locate an address and zoom in and use street view, I slowly realize he is actually zooming in on a school – and he says it is the school of the child of a woman he wants to find. That’s when I realized I was teaching him how to stalk someone.

      1. Youth Librarian*

        oh yeah, the stories can go on for days… i once kept a jury entertained for nearly a week with library stories. some of my memorable ones
        – guy wanted me to untangle his hair from his earring. I work with kids and just kind of did it without thinking and then afterwards was like, WTF?
        – regular patron tried to give their kids to one of our circ staff. just for a few weeks while they got things “figured out.” Maybe a month, they weren’t sure.
        – a kid asked for a band-aid. not unreasonable until i looked at them and they’d fallen off their bike – blood from the knee to the ankle. that led to a whole thing where we discovered the parent had no idea where their 8 year old was disappearing to for hours every day (and didn’t particularly care).
        – have definitely had the “find people for me to stalk” thing, but i usually got out of it by being mysteriously unable to find the information. however, one patron wanted me to find the address of their son, whose girlfriend (whose name they did not know) had just had a baby in a nearby large city. basically they wanted me to call around to all the hospitals until i found out where this unnamed baby of an unnamed woman had been born and then give them the information so they could contact their son who, i was not surprised, refused to give them their information.

  325. irene adler*

    This is my sister’s experience from many years ago.

    My sister was the receptionist at a public relations firm named for its owner. She’d been working there for over a year. The owner of the firm would often walk by her desk and give her a friendly nod as she was answering the phones.

    One day, her boss called her into her office. Told her that she was mispronouncing the company name. In fact, she said this was brought to her attention by the owner himself.

    My sister was very surprised to hear this. No one – including the owner- had said anything to her about this. Mortified, she says, “Oh dear! I hope he’s not upset. How should I be pronouncing his name?”

    Boss smiles and says, “It’s not so much how you are pronouncing it but how you are saying it.”

    “I don’t quite understand what you mean. I’ve been pronouncing it the way I was told when I was hired. Owner has heard me say it numerous times, never once corrected me.”

    “Well, he’s not one to that.”

    My sister suggests, “How about if I go and ask him right now how to pronounce his name?”

    “No, no! We can’t bother him with things like this. He’s got too many important projects going. In fact, don’t even bring this up with him.”

    At this point, boss pulls out a business card, hands it to my sister.

    “Go see her. She’s my hypnotist. She’s fantastic. Helped me learn to focus and achieve many goals throughout my career.”

    “Um, okay. Is this person covered under our insurance? If not, I really can’t afford to pay for something like this myself.”

    “The company will pay for this. Don’t worry. We’ll pay for everything. She can help you. You should make an appointment right away.”

    My sister doesn’t put much stock in hypnosis. But she does as she’s instructed and makes the appointment.

    At the appointment, my sister explains why she’s there. They talk a bit. What do you know about hypnosis? Have you ever gone to a hypnotist before? What kind of goals do you have? What things do you want in your life?

    They then discuss hypnotizing her. Would it be okay to do this?

    Yes.

    She’s told that the session won’t take long, so maybe they can explore some other things while she’s under.

    Sure, my sister says.

    The hypnotist does her thing. My sister doesn’t feel like anything’s happened. There’s some talk about wanting to please the owner. Okay, fine. That’s why I’m here.

    Only, things take a strange turn. The hypnotist asks her about what she remembers about her childhood. My sister responds, not sure what the point is of this exercise. They delve into her earliest childhood memories.

    Then, she’s asked to recall memories from before she was born. Memories from past lives. Hold on, my sister is thinking. I don’t buy into that past life stuff one bit.

    The hypnotist asks her to tell her where she is-what part of the world did she live in during her past life. Only problem, she’s not recalling anything about a past life. Totally nothing. Blank.

    Try harder, the hypnotist tells her. Nothing.

    So to please the woman, she says, “China. I think I’m in China.”

    “Good!” This is very good!”, the hypnotist says, excitedly. “What do you see?”

    “People. A lot of people. A crowd.”

    This goes on for a bit until the session ends. Hypnotist determines from what my sister told her, that my sister lived in China in a prior life over 2,000 years ago as a small child of commoners and may not have reached adulthood. Urges her to return for another session to explore this further.

    Later, she calls to relate this to me, completely at a loss for what occurred. “I’m not going back,” she says.

  326. You can be any mouse*

    I worked in an in-house design team for a corporation with many smaller brands. A new brand was being created, with a storefront ready to open inside a larger brand. (Think a gift shop or coffee shop in a hotel.)

    The Powers That Be couldn’t decide on a logo until 3 days before the storefront was to open. I asked when the new go-live date would be, since clearly all the signage had to include the logo and would not be ready in 3 days.

    Nope, we could not change the go-live date. We busted our butts and got all the design work out in a day, and the vendors were cajoled into printing everything in a day so the crews could hang it all up before the afternoon opening.

    Come to find out later, the new brand had an entire theme no one had told the design team about. Not only would that have helped in creating the logo (and maybe getting one approved much much sooner) but a lot of the designs and copy could have been done in a way to support that theme, but obviously weren’t.

    This incident was a super extreme example of the kind of disorganization that was all too common. I was so glad to get out. Every time I see the main building of the company, I do a little dance about how they aren’t my problem anymore.

  327. Submerged Tenths*

    College age bartender in a “nice” restaurant. Server comes to the bar with a big tip from a customer, who is trying to impress his date. Customer wants the next drink for his date aflame. Date was drinking Perrier. Guess what — water does not burn, although we tried.

  328. Sara*

    Former boss asked me to take his college courses (it was online) so he wouldn’t lose his job. He had promised to get a degree in a specific timeframe and didn’t. He said since I would be doing it during work hours and getting paid (from taxpayer monies, no less) – it was okay. I didn’t do it and he fired me not long after (despite a prior exemplary performance review).

  329. WestOfTheRiver*

    My first professional job was an account manager for a SaaS company that served restaurants. We’d provide a restaurant with one or two touch-screen monitors during installation (full-size monitors, not just like tablets), and my boss required us to keep the monitor boxes afterwards in case a monitor failed and we ever needed the information. It wasn’t good enough to keep just the stickers or take photos or otherwise document the info; we were required to keep the whole, uncollapsed boxes the monitors came in.

    This would be weird but not too bad, except that every position in the company was 100% remote. So by the time I left the job after about two years, I had a stack of something like 50 giant computer monitor boxes in my garage, with zero purpose or reimbursement for storing them.

    Of course, after never getting any direction on what to do with them, I threw them all out once I needed to move.

  330. Dungeon Doldrums*

    I was in the pilot program of a new training program, for a field that was brand new. So the woman running the program was making it up as she went along a bit. A significant part of the program was about sexual consent being laid out very clearly ahead of time, and she decided to we should go as a class to a BDSM party. The one she picked was a “gentleman’s night” where all the dominants were men and all the submissives were women and there was an extremely strict dress code for women (skirts and heels, or fetish gear). I, a soft butch lesbian, almost fell out of my chair when I get that email. I ended up just telling her I couldn’t make it that night and instead went to a much more generic “intro to BDSM” scene at a local dungeon. But it’s an email burned into my memory.

  331. SpaceySteph*

    Its not as outrageous as some of these stories, but my first real job as a high school student I was a receptionist in this small (3 people, including me) medical office. The owner/Dr. had seriously no clue what she was doing. Among the things she asked me to do:
    – She was going on a personal trip and had me call every car rental agency at the Boston airport to find one that would guarantee she could rent a stick shift PT Cruiser.
    – I spent several hours on hold with the plumber who was redoing her bathroom (its been many years and I still remember the hold jingle “just call Charlie Swain and wash your troubles right down the drain!”)
    – When it was time for me to leave to go to college, she had me take, no joke, the typing test in the computer game Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, and then whatever my WPM score was is what went in the monster(dot)com ad as a ‘must type at least X WPM.’ I am a child of the AIM generation, so I type decently fast just from practice, but wouldn’t consider myself a particularly good typist by any stretch. She just figured whatever I was doing was working well enough for her so she needed at least that level of skill going forward.

  332. Snackie Onassis*

    Oh this is my time to shine! When I was 22, I was the personal and executive assistant for the president of a capital management firm. I have so many stories. Once, my boss was on a family vacation to a luxury ski resort (that I had planned/booked) and he forgot his swim trunks for the hot tub. He asked me to go to his home, get his swim trunks from his bedroom, and FedEx them to him. Thankfully, I was able to convince him to instead purchase swim trunks from the resort’s gift shop, which I also then had to coordinate over the phone and had them delivered to him.

  333. ClaredeLoone*

    Someone kept stealing the toilet paper from the public restroom at the small library I worked at.
    The director decided we would post a sign on the bathroom door notifying the public that TP was available at the circulation desk to be handed out on demand. Even on storytime day when parents are hustling small children around.
    I was already looking for a new library job and that motivated me.
    Fortunately this procedure only lasted about 10 days.

  334. Celeste*

    When I worked as a Development Assistant for a major city’s branch of a national non-profit, part of my job involved helping out with fund-raising events (though most of my day job was keeping track of donor records in our database). One year our annual gala was a theme party with period costumes. My team even went to local costume shops and second-hand stores to put together costumes for ourselves for this event. Incidentally, the costume piece really sucked, as the period fashion in question was pretty garish and only flattering to certain body types.

    The gala was held at a venue in a section of the city that is extremely busy and where parking is basically impossible. We had valet arrangements, but my boss was really set on ensuring that a few very rich people who were major donors were not inconvenienced at all by parking, so she had somehow arranged for a spot to be held in front of the venue for a specific person, only it couldn’t continue to be held once things got started. Thus it was that I was ordered to go stand in the street/in the parking space in my ridiculous period costume until these wealthy donors decided to show up. A few people tried to park and I had to just…refuse to move my costumed body out of the parking space. Thankfully the donors showed up before any truly aggressive parkers could make me rethink that.

  335. Toads, Beetles, Bats*

    My boss wanted to hold our 1:1s in the bathroom while she pooped. It was a residential-style bathroom with no partition. I acquiesced once; I was 22.

    1. CW*

      Okay that’s just…wrong. I wouldn’t even take phone calls while using the bathroom. I just want my privacy.

      And like, ew. What if she had diarrhea? That’s as far as I will go, but I can’t even imagine.

    3. Artemesia*

      I have heard of men doing this as a dominance move (LBJ was notorious for it) but this is the first time I have heard of a woman doing it.

  336. Safely Retired*

    Turning this around, the strangest things I ever asked anyone at work to do…

    I had about four years experience post-college and was about to go on a business trip for the company that had no end date. I was going to be working at the company’s office in the United Kingdom. I wouldn’t be around for some basic tasks, including getting paid and paying bills. I clearly remember writing checks to my landlord for each month’s rent and putting each one in its own stamped addressed envelope with the date it was to be mailed on the outside. I don’t have as clear a memory about how paychecks were handled, but I think I provided a bunch of deposit slips. I took all this to the department secretary/admin and asked if she would handle it for me. She had the deer-in-the-headlights look, but agreed. It all worked smoothly.

    I also had a jade plant at home that needed care. I asked one of my co-workers, a woman, if she would take care of it. When I turned it over to her it had six leaves, no branches, and was in a water glass with colored sand. It has survived two years of my ownership but was hardly thriving, When I returned I asked for it back. My coworker was not happy about that, but she did. She had put it in a proper pot, with proper dirt. It now had branches and lots of leaves. I still have that plant 42 years later; it is now a very large Jade plant.

    The trip lasted 13 weeks. I received cash advances in British pounds. My monster of an expense report, which was in US dollars of course, was all hand-written on NCR paper forms. 13 pages for each week, two more totaling it all up. No receipts as there were no items over $25. Never questioned.

    1. CBB*

      It’s been years since I last wrote a check. Probably decades since I last filled out a deposit slip.

      There are some things I miss about the old days, but not the inconvenience of paper-based banking.

  337. Emma*

    My direct report’s wife miscarried at 8 months and both were devastated. My direct report took 2 days off to be with his wife and my boss ordered me to tell my direct report to man up, stop moping and get back to work since working hard was the best way of getting over his loss.
    #worstbossoftheyear

    1. SpaceySteph*

      Omg that’s horrible. At 8 months his wife had to deliver a basically fully grown baby and recover physically from birth just like someone who had a living baby would. That boss was a terrible human.

    2. Chauncy Gardener*

      That is just the most heartless thing I have ever heard. Man up?? O.M.G. Man up and be a human!!

    3. Emma*

      Yeah, and my direct report was the most hardworking, friendly and humble Japanese man. It was such a terrible situation.

  338. overcaffeinatedandqueer*

    I also volunteer with cats and kittens. Add feeding every four hours, rubbing kitty with wet wipes so the tiny ones go potty, getting bit, scratched, puked, peed, and pooped on to the absurdity.

    I also never get to go to the bathroom by myself.

  339. Snippasnap*

    Oh lordy. During undergrad, I wanted some professional writing experience to add to my resume so I picked up a part-time job proofreading for a business that developed training materials. It was operated out of a person’s home and I guess the owners decided college kids were just up for anything and didn’t care what they were actually doing to earn their pay!

    So I arrived one day wearing my standard “trying to show respect for the job” blouse and slacks and learned that the day’s task was to… repaint their deck. The other student workers didn’t seem to mind, which made me feel like maybe I was being a stick-in-the-mud, so I pitched in trying to be a good sport. I was later scolded for my lack of enthusiasm.

    Then a few weeks later, I was shown into a room with a two-foot-high pile of assorted bikini tops and bottoms. My task was to match all the pieces up to about nine different receipts, then to return everything from the piles to Target. Not just one Target, but to several different Targets across the state. I should also do it in several trips so it didn’t… look suspicious? I can’t remember whether I actually did this or quit shortly thereafter – either way, BEE-ZAHR! Who buys that many bathing suits? Was it to just be able to try everything on super-leisurely and under good lighting at home?

  340. Bernice Clifton*

    I worked at a branch of a national financial services company pre-COVID. There were ~20 employees in the office, and for various reasons related to offices in general and that particular company, there were usually only a handful of people in the office on Fridays in the summer.

    So as kind of a treat on some Fridays, the employees would go in on ordering pizza, but it was voluntary. The order was usually organized by one of the two admins (I was one). One Friday when I was on PTO, the other admin decided to organize a pizza order, and one of our directors decided he would treat whomever wanted pizza that day with his own money.

    The other admin sent an email to the employees in the office that day telling them to let her know if they wanted pizza so she knew how much to order.

    Her plan was to order enough for everyone who wanted pizza for lunch to get 2-3 large pieces of pizza. She had ordered from the pizza place many times and knew how much to order depending on the size of the group, and the director who paid could decide what to do with any leftovers if there were any.

    One of our colleagues came to the admin’s desk and asked her to order a full large pizza for him to bring home for his family. Yes, he knew the director was paying with his own money and not the company’s (which still would have been an unreasonable request in that case). No, he wasn’t joking. No, there’s no reason to believe this was a food insecurity issue for the coworker. Yes, the admin refused.

  341. Slinky*

    There was the time it was suggested that I could “just learn Japanese” in a few weeks.

    Fortunately, this suggestion was NOT made by my manager, who was very quick to point out how unreasonable that was.

    1. Jay Gobbo*

      Dear lord I assume you mean business Japanese, which I have not mastered after almost 20 years of studying Japanese (I used to be better at it but it’s deteriorated a lot…)

  342. Choggy*

    I once worked at a yogurt shop that also sold sandwiches so there were tuna and chicken salads to be made. Well, where they were made was in the basement of the place where you had to stand in about 2 inches of water. It’s not very clear why there was 2 inches of water on the floor but I’m thinking it was probably a good set up to be electricuted. I only hope, from these stories told here, that parents tell their kids if something doesn’t smell right, it probably isn’t! I hate the fact that someone in a superior position put fear of firing or retaliation into someone to go along with inappropriate requests. Tangentally, my husband was asked by his step-father to paint something on his roof, this after my husband broke both wrists because step-father did not set up ladder correctly during a previous time my husband was doing painting for him. Husband did not even have a chance to respond before I said “Hell no!” Good for those who spoke up, wish I felt I could at the time.

  343. Sleepless KJ*

    I worked for a Florida middle school principal and was put on a PIP because I wasn’t able to export photographs of textbook pages (not PDFs – these were JPGs) to MS Word for my boss to plagiarize. She didn’t accept that it wasn’t possible and “didn’t like my attitude” when I pointed out that what she wanted to do was illegal anyway.

  344. Guin*

    I worked at a place I liked, and one of the big perks of the job was an on-site daycare, which closed promptly at 4 pm each day. The job’s hours were 8-4 to accomodate this. A new boss came in, and after a few months, said it was “inconvenient” for me to leave at 4, and she would rather have my hours be 9-5 because that was when she was in the office. I pointed out that my contract said 8-4, and reminded her that the daycare closed at 4. She asked, “Well, couldn’t you take him home at four [leaving him in an empty house] and then come back until 5?” My child was three at the time. I stared at her in disbelief and choked out a “No.” We had a very tense relationship after that and I ended up quitting in about three months. I assume she hired someone with no children after I left.

    1. Siege*

      I mean … aside from everything else, unless you work next door, you’re not getting back in time anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever worked closer than 20 minutes’ drive away.

  345. Isabel Archer*

    I was forced, along with the rest of my coworkers, to attend the owner’s daughter’s school musical. Elementary school. In a church. I mean, it was on company time, but still.

  346. SurvivorofBadBoss*

    Back in the 1970s I worked at a call center with all women co-workers and we had a male boss who, every time he had to pee, would ask one of the women to come into the bathroom and “Hold it for him.” Obviously, no one did but he never stopped saying that and he never got any trouble for doing so. Yes, we have come a long ways.

    2. West Wind*

      In my entire life, I’m not sure I have read three sentences that enraged me so profoundly, so quickly. I hope y’all all go pee on his grave.

  347. YesILikePhotographyBut*

    Used to work for a botanical garden doing graphic design, advertising design, posters, marketing emails, etc. Low paid, no benefits (this was a stopgap job post-2008 recession till I found something better). The director would vaguely dislike much of what I did, but wouldn’t give me clear reasons why. After a while, it became clear she wanted the work done by her son, who recently graduated with a degree in graphic design, as she would dismiss my work and when I asked what I needed to change, she’d say “I don’t know, but I’ll just know I like it when I see it”. Which was code for “I’ll like what my son does”. So this was to say the least, demoralizing.

    Well, final straw was when they started doing these pre-packaged weddings on site, and asked me to do photography for them. Using my personal equipment. For $50. I said seriously, $50 a wedding? They said oh no, $50 for ALL THE WEDDINGS. So they wanted me to be a wedding photographer (something I have zero experience doing), and work weekends doing multiple weddings a day, for a single $50 payment. When I said no, they said “But we thought you like doing photography!”

    Right. I do. It’s a serious hobby of mine. But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to be severely underpaid to do it.

    That gave me the kick in the butt to look harder, and with a couple weeks, I found something new and gave my notice. What a happy day that was. And yes, she hired her son to replace me, as I expected she would do.

  348. Nope nope nope*

    My boss at the time was getting investigated by the state. To cover his tracks, he asked my coworker (who had apparently been employed by him long enough to have seen several rounds of state investigations for various illegal activities), to ask me to forge a client’s signature. I made it look like I didn’t know how/was horrifically bad at it, so my coworker gave up and did it herself. Mind you that state officials were literally in the office next to us searching our files while all this went down. I noped right out of that job a month later!

  349. Startup HR*

    I was the HR manager for this company in the UK. We had an employee who had only started working for us a bit more than 2 months before this happened. Her performance was really good, but she had already taken several sick days. We thought that she was taking another, but she didn’t call out at all. We couldn’t contact her. The director, also a woman, was pressuring me to issue an AWOL letter. I wanted to wait to give her time to see what was happening. As it turns out, she had hyperemesis gravidarum (extreme morning sickness) and was in the hospital with an IV in her arm because she was so dehydrated. She had forgotten to call out while being hospitalized.

    I thought that this was understandable and we should offer some leeway to our absence policy. The director did not. She thought that the woman was such a ‘delicate flower’ that she wouldn’t even be able to handle being a mom since she couldn’t handle pregnancy. Also, the employee was clearly only out for a maternity leave payout and a ‘looter’ since she didn’t tell us that she was about one week pregnant when we interviewed her. (We only had the legal minimum maternity leave, which is better than in the US, but not great.) We had quite a heated discussion about whether or not I could do anything to fire the employee. Not only was there nothing legal that we could do, I refused to do anything at all to make life more difficult for the employee. The director was Not Happy with me.

    In completely and totally unrelated news, I’m job hunting.

  350. Anon for This*

    This happened at my old office, but not to me. My coworker had a kitchen fire in her home and sustained third degree burns on her hand. She was in the hospital for a week or so and needed a skin graft on her hand. While she was there, her terrible boss showed up at the hospital and launched into her for ruining her vacaion and told her she needed to plan better if she was going to be out. I guess this means the silliest thing we were asked to do was give management advance notice if we were going to be out sick, hurt, or maimed. It became a running joke while we were both still working there. Fortunately, we were able to escape quickly.

  351. OIFvet*

    Not my story, but I’m related to the person it happened to. In Baghdad, very early in the war, this person was tasked with driving around their unit’s area of operations to find radio dead-space, the places where the radios wouldn’t work because buildings were blocking the signal. They had to drive up every street and stop every 50 feet or so and basically replay the old Verizon “Can you hear me now” commercial. The kicker was this had already been accomplished via software that predicted the dead space. But the person in charge didn’t trust the software, so instead sent nine people out in three vehicles to drive a predictable route through a combat zone.

  352. Lentils*

    I’m sure mine will be small potatoes compared to most of this thread, but in my first office job I was eventually promoted to the lead for an otherwise all-remote team. We did transcription work for a variety of clients but particularly [insert household name tech company you can certainly guess]. My company was based in China with multiple offices in other countries, including the US one where I worked, but my two managers were in Beijing. I was technically the only member of the transcription team who was both in the US and in this particular office. I didn’t have an onsite manager for a solid year while I worked there, just a couple of women (E and I) who were technically on another team but who tried to help me out as much as they could. The Beijing managers were the ones who largely interacted with our clients.

    Well, I came in one day and E and I were lowkey freaking out. “What’s going on?” “We have [large client] coming for an office visit and they’re not supposed to know the transcription managers for the US English team are in China and not in the US!” “We’re going to have YOU pretend to be Manager 1, is that okay?” “……..I guess so?”

    As I recall, the clients didn’t even need to meet with me so the panic was all for naught, but that was one of the more sitcom-y things that happened during my time there. (I would casually refer to it as “dumpster fire job” in private.)

  353. Introverted Type-A Employee*

    While in college for Computer Science I worked for a commercial real estate appraiser generating various digital maps and plans. One Friday I arrived at work to find his grade school age daughter at my desk. He informed me that she was struggling with math and that instead of doing my regular mapping work, I would be spending the day tutoring his daughter in math (he knew I was very good at math, obviously).

    I really do not like kids. I cannot overstate how much I do not like kids. They also make me incredibly uncomfortable. However, I felt I didn’t really have a choice and I did what I was told. It was awkward and miserable. Neither of us wanted to be doing this.

    The kicker? He informed me at the end of the day that I would need to come in the next day (my Saturday OFF that I planned to use to do a ton of college coursework and studying) to do the mapping work that I should have gotten done that day so he could meet his deadline with the client. UGH!

  354. Temperance*

    Back when I worked in shared office space (NEVER work in shared office space if you can help it), my grandboss hated me AND did whatever she could to cut corners so her bonuses were higher. Which meant that she offered things for free that our building would do for a fee, and voluntold me to do them. Like moving and stacking heavy cabinets made of metal, deep cleaning people’s offices, setting up their computers for them, setting up complex phone trees, and more.

    I physically couldn’t lift and stack the cabinets, because they were over 100 lbs each, and she friggen complained SO much that we had to pay the building engineers a whopping $25/pop to do so. She actually didn’t even have to offer that as a service, it was her friggen idea in the first place.

  355. Nicotena*

    When I was a few years into my career I took a job that was a step back so that I could relocate to a more desirable market. My boss was a very senior position and a man of “a certain era” who wasn’t always up to modern norms (but had good personal connections so the company was willing to keep him on). Some stuff I kind of rolled my eyes at – transferring his paper calendar into outlook and vice-versa, copying his rollodex into our CSR – but the thing that I thought was the weirdest was that it was my job to manage his personal football fantasy team. Like, it was done online, and he couldn’t handle that, so he had me do it for him as a job task. It was not work related. I was young enough that I didn’t realize how weird that was; also, I was not his personal assistant/EA where it might have been somewhat related.

  357. bureaucratte*

    OOH! I just remembered that I had one. I interned for an elected official (years and years ago) and somehow I was (allegedly) the only one in the office that could read his handwriting (?). Therefore, I was tasked with typing up the summary of the novel he had written under a pen name (the blurb that goes on the back of a book or, I guess to publishers). It included the phrase “breasts shaped like ice cream cones” .

  358. Ash*

    I once had a boss ask me to change an employee’s yearly evaluation because it was too much of a headache to deal with the person being unhappy with the results. For reference the person got meets expectations in most areas, but they wanted exceeds expectations. Also the person had resigned and no longer worked there at the time of the follow up meeting. I printed out a “special” evaluation for the person and didn’t sign it.

    Also I had a college friend who worked a work study job in a campus museum. Her boss was Wiccan, and wanted her to organize some arts and crafts for her upcoming coven gathering. My friend didn’t do it and told the boss she got busy with actual work.

  359. Elizabeth West*

    This is pretty tame, but my bosses at one job got this booklet called Listen Up! A Guide to Develop Customer Loyalty. There was a charge for a presentation that went along with it. They were super cheap, so they made me duplicate the booklet in a PowerPoint so they wouldn’t have to pay for it. I was told not to say anything about it.

    1. R*

      I feel like if their system really worked then your boss would feel obligated and even proud to purchase their product.

      1. Lily of the Meadow*

        What? No, just because someone has a system that works, that does not mean it will cure cheapskates of being cheapskates. Not everything is a scam because there are people too cheap to pay for it.

  360. Parakeet*

    When I was in college, I worked very briefly at a progressive canvassing organization where we were expected to stay 60-90 minutes late every day without overtime pay (we were hourly workers). We were sent out by ourselves to go door-to-door, and I was expected to keep working the same neighborhood even after some guy wouldn’t let me leave and threatened to beat me up for at least 15 minutes (and then fired for not raising enough that day).

    Some years later, a prospective manager propositioned me for sex in exchange for a job (I did not proceed with the interview, and told him not to contact me again).

  361. College Career Counselor*

    Back when I was in college (I’ve told stories here before about this job), I was working fast food. The manager of the franchise was expecting a visit from corporate, and he had royally pissed off the local garbage collection by not fixing the gate around the trash area so they could get in and out easily. As a result, they hadn’t picked up for….at least a couple of weeks. This is in the middle of summer in the southeastern U.S., so this dumpster was both overflowing and ripe. The manager sent me out in the parking lot to climb into the dumpster and JUMP UP AND DOWN on the fast food garbage (95 degrees, high humidity) to get the level of refuse down below the height of the dumpster so he wouldn’t get dinged in his review by corporate.

    I was 18 and needed the job, so I did it. But I threw those shoes and clothes away as soon as I got home.

  362. Anon for this*

    I (a woman) attended a Catholic college that was affiliated with a local seminary. The seminarians could take their non-priestly classes at the college, and then when they graduated, they would have a bachelor’s degree from College as well as whatever document they received from the seminary (I never did find out what that was). I had a work-study job as a Latin tutor, and you guessed it, most of my students were seminarians, as there isn’t much of a requirement for Latin outside of the Catholic Church these days. Almost ALL of the seminarians asked me out at one point and it was implied by my department head that I should at least let them date me once or twice, “so they would really understand what they were giving up.” Um, no thank you, and frankly, ew.

  363. The letter F*

    Obligatory coworker story. I worked in a research lab where we did research for spinal cord injury. None of us had any special medical, nursing or caregiving training.
    My coworker was working with a woman and the woman, who was in a wheelchair, asked to use the restroom. My coworker showed her the room and the woman asked my coworker to help empty her catheter bag and help clean her up (this was some years ago so all the details escape me about exactly what my coworker was asked to do). My coworker was incredibly uncomfortable and said she didn’t know how to deal with that but the woman just said that it was easy and talked her through it.

    This maybe isn’t unreasonable in the classic sense but it put my coworker in an awkward spot and things like this were not included in the job description.

  364. Not really a Waitress*

    I worked for a small business, that really wasn’t as small as they claimed to be. There were 5 people in the ownership team. 2 couples, one that ran the day to day, the other a distant partner, and one single man. And everything was punctuated with “But we’re a FAMMMIIILLLLLYYYY” I was my own department. In the beginning when I needed things, I would ask the office manager to order them for me, but I would log into my Amazon account for her so when she ordered stuff she could get us free shipping. One day the Female half of the couple asked me to put my Amazon login (my prime that I paid for personally each year) in the password book so we all had it. I pretended not to hear her. However her husband did and yelled at her. They spent the rest of the day fighting.

  365. You can be any mouse*

    Same employer as above, though it happened more to a coworker than to me:

    Owner of company was flying in his private jet to a fundraising event for an ecological issue. Owner wanted the jet wrapped with a design to support the cause. In 2 days.

    Someone on our team designed it. The person who coordinates with vendors called around, looking for someone who could do the job. She found one in SoCal. So the jet had to fly to SoCal, get wrapped, and fly back home, pick up the owner and wife, and jet off to wherever.

    I can’t help but wonder:
    a) wouldn’t it be better for the environment/ecological cause to NOT fly a jet?

    and

    b) wouldn’t it better support the cause to donate the money spent on the wrap, installation, jet fuel and operating costs than to do this massive piece of performative support that I can’t imagine more than 200 people (if that) even saw?

  366. CW*

    I am not sure if this is totally unreasonable, but in 2018, I accepted a temp-to-hire position paying more that what I have ever been making up to that point. My potential boss, the recruiter, and I negotiated a start date of the following Tuesday, as I got the offer on Friday. I was fine with that. I was told to go into the office in the big city, as they had another office in the suburbs. The office in the big city was assessible by public transportation, the suburban office was not. I was asked to report at 9am on that Tuesday. No biggie. Getting to the office in the big city via public transportation would have taken 30 minutes, tops. I thought I could get up at a little before 8am and get ready.

    Mind you, traffic in my area was horrid pre-COVID (think LA bad), so to get to the suburban office office would have taken over 2 hours if I didn’t leave early. And I mean before 7am early.

    Well, the weekend and the following Monday passed, and I hadn’t heard anything from my potential boss and the recruiter, so I assumed that I was going to go to the office in the big city. On that Tuesday morning, at around 7:45am, my potential boss, who saved my phone number, texted me to go into the suburban office. My heart sank; I had just gotten out of bed, I was still in my pajamas, I had not yet brushed my teeth or had breakfast, and I was still in a groggy state. Plus, I had not gotten any notice in advance that they wanted me to go to the other office. At that point, I would have been over an hour late on my first day.

    They knew my address, and knew I lived 40 miles away from the suburban office. I started having nagging second thoughts. I told my aunt about it (I was living with her at the time), and my aunt told me that it wasn’t right that they let me know on the morning of at the last minute. After 15 minutes of thinking about it, I decided to withdraw from the position. I called my recruiter, and he gave me a really bad attitude, then gave me an ultimatum that I better respond in the next 15 minutes or else he would tell the boss. I made no reply.

    This was also for a startup company that was less than a year old. A week later, when my parents flew in to visit, we visited a friend, and this friend told me that I was fortunate not to take a position because most startups are usually very disorganized and not stable while in the beginning stages. This company wasn’t even a year old; I had no idea of that red flag. I guess I was fortunate.

    Could I have handled it better? Most definitely. Should I not have jumped? Probably. But as I was still starting out my career, I lacked the knowledge and confidence of properly handling these things. Thankfully it hasn’t happened since.

  367. Eleanor Shellstrop*

    When I worked for a Disney store in Europe, every time you were out sick you had to have a re-entry meeting with your manager when you returned so they could fill out paperwork. During one meeting I had after I was out with food poisoning, my manager made me actually describe my symptoms to him because he had to put it on the form. Like, it wasn’t enough to say I had food poisoning, I had to tell my actual manager that I had diarrhea. SUPER FUN.

  368. Raccoon Rampage*

    I offhandedly mentioned to an old boss that one of my parents is a professional artist. This was very exciting to her. She immediately went off to get several binders full of vacation photos she’d taken. She said she was working on developing her skills as a photographer and wanted to submit some of her work to a contest, but she had to narrow it down to six pictures. She said that since I was “part of the artist community” I should pick the six best ones from her binders for me to submit.

    My job had nothing to do with art, nor did I have any personal background with art. My parent didn’t even work with photography, they were in a completely different field. I tried to explain this, but she said she just wanted to know which of her photos were the most “generally artistic”. I spent the better part of the afternoon going through the binders and ended up picking six more or less at random. I left the job before finding out how she did in the contest.

    For what it’s worth I generally liked this boss, but this stuck out as a bizarre request.

    1. Mental Lentil*

      This reminds me of a college job I had working at what amounted to an upscale fruit market. A customer told me she had no idea how to pick out a good pineapple. For the record, I didn’t either, but out of either fear or gumption, I told her I could find a good one.

      So I went through several pineapples, sniffing the tops and bottoms, and squeezing them, and hefting them into the air. It was quite the show. I finally just picked one more or less at random and handed it to her. She bought it and left.

      A week later, she came back to tell me that was the best fresh pineapple she had ever had.

      1. Raccoon Rampage*

        I was taught you gauge the freshness of pineapples by how easily you can pull the fronds out of the top. I have no idea whether that’s actually any better than random guessing or not.

  369. Catnip*

    My very first job out of school, I was paid hourly but theoretically worked 9-5, 5 days a week. I say theoretically because it was very common to stay late/come in on weekends. Our system was that if you worked overtime, you could “bank” those hours for paid time off on top of your 3 weeks vacation. However, when I started I was told that I had to always put 9-5 Monday-Friday on my time card regardless of the hours I actually worked – the one except was noting sick days and paid vacation days that didn’t come out of banked hours. I was told it was because it was too much work for our small Finance office to track the hours, otherwise. You tracked your own banked hours, along with when you took them.

    Theoretically, this could benefit employees (people claiming banked hours they don’t have); in practice, because of the nonprofit culture, it meant that people would bank 100s of hours in a year and not use them. A lot of employees couldn’t even take their normal 3 weeks, because of the workload! And since there was no documentation, when the nonprofit didn’t pay that overtime, there was no evidence to file a Labour Board claim. (Most of the hourly employees were young and in first jobs, and it didn’t occur to any of us to document independently).

    They actually used exactly the same system for overtime if you became salaried; the one difference is that if you were salaried they wouldn’t pay out unused vacation time, nor would it roll over. SUPER illegal in this area, and they only started paying out because a new president came in and called them on it, along with a bunch of other illegal practices. He was let go after only a year… can you guess why?

    1. anon for this canada*

      this is why it shocks me when people use “other business also do this” as a reason something isn’t illegal. Like just because the employees either don’t know their rights or are afraid of the consequences or reporting (job loss, and not being able to find a new job for example) doesn’t make something legal.

  370. __ID__*

    I used to work for a small independent film studio in Los Angeles. We had just signed a deal with an A-list actor. Very handsome and popular. But he had a little quirk – he didn’t like limos or anyone “making a fuss” – so I was once asked to give him a ride home.

    I declined because it would have made me so nervous that I would have wrecked the car with him in it!!! Now I wish I’d done it – just to have the story to tell.

    True story also – our mail room guy had a really old crappy car and would drive the Movie Star around town. Can you imagine being at s red light and looking over like “that guy looks like Super Hot Famous Actor – but in THAT car? No way!”

    1. TimesChange*

      Having random employees drive you home in their personal car sounds like “making a fuss” to me, but in a different way.

  371. healthcare worker*

    Have my office moved to the supply closet on a locked acute psychiatric unit (the area where patients were housed when they were still psychotic or at risk of violence to others) and keep the door open so patients could come in and visit with me, and if they tried to get at any of the supplies (which would just be pushed to the back of the room because there was no other storage space- and this included sharps) per my boss I was supposed to just tell them “oh no, we don’t go back there.” And when this move was delayed because the facilities people were too busy to paint the interior of the closet, my boss asked if I would paint the room myself if she let me pick out the color.

    I declined to paint (I’m a therapist, painting was not in my job description) and quit the job without other FT work already lined up. This was just the tip of the iceberg in that job. Oh, and when I expressed concern about my safety, my boss told me that “some people are not cut out for mental health.”

  372. Sammy Furbs*

    Among a host of inappropriate oversteppy-type things I was asked to do in my former managerial role, this one always stood out to me: I managed two departments and reported directly to everyone’s grand-boss, the company “leader”. One day, two of my direct reports were behind closed doors for a few minutes in a windowed office, so they could be seen, but not heard. I didn’t think much of it (aside from a few offices, it was a dreaded open floor plan, so if you didn’t want EVERYONE to know all of your business, you had to close doors!) but my boss did. He forced me to sit down and ask them what they were discussing. It was humiliating for all of us to learn that one of my employees had been ghosted by a Tinder date, and she’d been discussing it with her friend for literally four minutes. FOUR MINUTES). I told my boss it was a personal matter and I swear, that man brought up the situation about ten more times before he moved on. So. Glad. I. Do. Not. Work. There. Anymore.

  373. anon for this canada*

    I have asthma, after a particulary bad fire season it got significantly worse. So I was more reactive to things I didn’t realize I was mildly reacting to before that summer. Including the deepfryer room at my job. So I go try to work in it, figure out it’s triggering my asthma to go in there. So tell my boss that I can’t work in there as it triggers my asthma. She says fine, she’ll stop scheduling me for cooking shifts, (I don’t work that many of them at this point as it is). My next shift is at the start time for the cooking shift. I am working with my assistant manager who refuses to cook, because of this. So I try, and almost pass out and then absolutely refuse to cook. too dangerous if I pass out due to an asthma attack. could kill myself. struggle with my asthma for the rest of my shift too. Had a coworker tell me that my manager planned to continue to do this to force me to cook. Had seen her do that with another coworker, in a similar situation. So I contacted HR only to be told that “I can’t refuse to cook because I was hired to work all positions”. Like, I still have the right to refuse unsafe work, both due to my human rights and work safe. Luckily I didn’t have another shift where coworkers tried to make me cook before the manager was replaced and most other managers and coworkers accepted that I couldn’t go into that room for more then 30s without an asthma attack.

    I did have multiple managers try to suggest I put my PPE mask in the bathroom to avoid getting it tossed out by another coworker (the mask I use to prevent asthma attacks when using cleaning supplies or going into said room). because that’s where we store other things like our purses and jackets. which was gross, and I pointed out I needed unimpeded access to my mask and I had a coworker who spent way too much time in there. Thus I’d either be unable to clean or I’d end up in the hospital due to how my asthma reacts to cleaning supplies.
    luckily covid 19 eventually hit, I went on medical leave due having asthma attacks even with the mask due to the cleaning supplies usage. plus I can’t find the specific mask I need anymore sooo. (it’s a R95, not N95. I haven’t seen them since march 2020. and I only saw them in 2 brands prior to that 1 fit one didn’t)
    Now I’m working from home with a job that also pays minimum wage, but has 1/3 of the work load since I am only dealing with customers. not working in a retail store.

  374. Lady In Pink*

    In a previous job, I had a boss who was an expert in our field and the senior management heavily relied on him. One day he was in the hospital having surgery under general anesthesia. A VP wanted to talk to him and insisted that one of my coworkers call my boss’s wife on her cell phone and leave a message to call the VP back after he got out of surgery.

  375. HalloweenQueen*

    I refused to participate in creating a fake alibi for a customer who killed their spouse, and the manager got charged I think with either obstruction of justice or taking bribes. I worked for a big resort hotel in a huge outdoor tourism/recreation area. Think like a major ski resort. We had seasonal regulars all the time, usually very, very rich people. I answered a call from a really rich, semi-famous regular who asked me to check him into his chalet over the phone and he’d pick up his keys from the concierge. We don’t do that because we were staffed 24/7. He kept calling and pushing different staff to check him in over the phone, tried to order food and ski equipment for his chalet, it was weird, especially for someone who had been coming for five years and knew our policies. This guest even starts trying to offer us money to check him in over the phone. Super fishy.

    Finally, he gets my manager who is super pissed that none of us would check this guy in over the phone, pulling the whole “don’t you know who he is?” routine. Something was fishy about the whole thing. My manager hands me the phone and says “Check him in, he’s on his way”. Lol, nope. I wouldn’t do it since it’s against corporate policy.

    Manager got all cranky and did it himself being huffy about how “nobody works around here”. Good, break company policy. Three days go by, this guy never shows up. We don’t check people in over the phone because we need to swipe their credit card, so we had an unusable chalet that wasn’t getting billed to anyone but we couldn’t open it to book people until he checked out and got his bill settled, that’s how the software worked. Last day of the three days the state police and someone from THE FRICKEN FBI come in and ask to speak to me, my manager, and two other people he swears he interacted with on his busy ski weekend.

    Manager falls all over himself saying he saw the guy and checked him in, he’s been here the whole time because this dude can see he’s in deep trouble. The rest of the staff and I tell the truth; we never saw this dude all weekend, he harassed us all night calling and asking for us to vouch for him and check him in over the phone, tried to bribe us.

    Manager lost his job and I think was charged with obstruction or taking bribes or something? Super not good. So not following his instructions kept me from being charged with obstruction of justice. Go me.

    3. Trillian Astra*

      “I refused to participate in creating a fake alibi for a customer who killed their spouse” i mean….. !!!!!!!

      1. HalloweenQueen*

        How bad is it that I literally didn’t remember it until I read this post? Happened like 10,12 years ago?

  376. Euphony*

    I used to work as a photoshoot coordinator and one suitcase of samples came back from a shoot absolutely covered in sand. Like they’d been buried in it. We couldn’t return the samples in that condition so I spent an entire afternoon brushing encrusted sand off expensive wax jackets. The whole area smelt like a cross between wet dog and rotting seaweed for a week. Still it could have been worse – my colleagues handling lingerie samples have had to take stained samples home to wash them before they could be returned.

  377. Ms. Hagrid Frizzle*

    OH MY GOD. Can’t believe I forgot about the time I was asked to confess to stealing from the shop where I was working. It was 10 minutes before store opening and there was already a line of customers waiting to be let in when my boss asked me to talk to him at the table in the FRONT WINDOW.
    Boss: Is there anything you want to tell me?
    Me: Um, no? I finished stocking X and Y, so we’re all set.
    Boss: Well, I’ve been really impressed by your work so far, and you’re honestly our best employee, but I need you to be honest with me.
    Me: About what?
    Boss: I can’t forgive you if you don’t tell me. If you’re honest this will go better.
    Me: Um, I didn’t do anything to confess to?
    Boss: But I saw you. I have you on camera. You need to tell me what happened yesterday.
    Me: I closed up the shop alone after [Manager] left. We had some customers in the store, but they left and I locked up before cleaning. Can you tell me what you saw on the camera?
    Boss: You were stealing! I saw you.
    Me: *confused* I didn’t steal anything. You can check the camera!
    Boss: You should just admit it. I saw you moving the tip jar. It was very suspicious.
    Me: I didn’t want anyone to steal my tips when I couldn’t see them, so I put them behind the counter when I had to start cleaning in the back.
    Boss: But you stole from me! You kept putting your hand in the jar and moving it!
    Me: You think I stole. . . my tips? Linda took hers before she left, so all the money was mine.
    Boss: Yes, they are your tips, but that’s very suspicious you moved the jar!
    Me: [visibly upset] I didn’t steal anything!
    Boss: If you didn’t have anything to hide, you wouldn’t be this upset! We’ll let the police deal with this since you won’t confess.
    Me: [panicking, I was waiting on a background check to clear for a better job] Are you firing me?
    Boss: No, of course not, that’s for the police to decide. If they arrest you, you’re fired/ And since this is a police matter, you can’t tell anyone else about this.
    . . . I was young and upset, so I finished up my shift before I drove home. Thankfully, I didn’t actually have to go through a police investigation (a family friend on the force reassured me that my boss would be laughed out of the precinct) and I passed my background check, so I was able to turn in my notice later that same week! And my boss was shocked that I was leaving!

    1. Here we go again*

      I had something similar happen to me when I worked at Satan’s gas station manager called the police because I the only non smoker had stolen two cartons of Newport’s. Should’ve walked out right then but I was 19.

  378. Panicked*

    Two stories, two different employers.

    -I worked as an HR manager for a small entertainment venue that gave out bottled water to each patron. The owner would purchase three pallets worth of bottled water cases at a time and refused to schedule other coverage when the truck would arrive. Not only that, but the truck couldn’t get into our small parking lot, so I had to download the truck, carry each case up a small hill, and then through the venue to a storage area. In the summer, in the deep south.

    – The other employer asked me on several occasions to use my own money for payroll, otherwise our employees wouldn’t get paid. While I sympathized with the employees, I was not going to write off thousands of my savings that I knew I would never get back. This happened SEVERAL times.

  379. Here we go again*

    90 year old boss who was in the beginning stages of dementia asked me to hold her dentures.

  380. Texan In Exile*

    I have cleaned human feces off the bathroom floor.

    I was not the cleaning person.

    In college, I was a lifeguard at a city pool and part of our duties were cleaning the bathrooms, including cleaning after the boys who thought it was funny to poop on the floor.

    It’s gross as is, but I have since learned that actual cleaning people go through training and there are protocols to deal with cleaning human waste.

    I don’t even think we had gloves. I must have used newspaper or something. What a disgusting memory.

    Oh. And this was for minimum wage.

  381. Nesprin*

    I worked as a researcher in a cadaver lab. Biggest lesson was if your boss asks “hey Nesprin, are you busy”, the correct answer is “Why”. In my callow youth, I once answered “No”, and my boss handed me a bag of human feet to de-flesh.

    (this was actually a really great job- I learned a ton, was given as much responsibility as I could handle and developed into the (lowly) successful researcher researcher I am today).

  382. Chillgamesh*

    I was a writer in a PR position for a large university. My boss’s boss asked me to help her son with his fifth grade book report. The kid honestly ended up being the best coworker I ever had there! We put together the book report (on a biography of Al Capone), which was formatted as a poster. A few days later, I had to help redo it because the teacher graded it down for being the wrong dimensions.

    I moved on to a different job, but I still knew people who worked with this boss. She was fired a couple years later. No one knew why. But she wasn’t just fired, she was disappeared. The higher ups never mentioned her departure. It was like she’d never been there at all.

  384. Ex Girl Friday*

    I was asked to arrange for a department head to travel to from the Pacific Northwest in the US to Kenya on short notice for an interior design consultation based only on an email from a potential client with minimal detail. It smelled like a scam to me and I refused.

    It was a scam.

  385. Recruited Recruiter*

    I was asked to bring a person in for a baseline entry level position interview. This person was way overqualified for that entry level position, and there was no way that the person would have wasted time on an interview if she had known what she was interviewing for. So the hiring manager demanded that I bring her in for an interview for a director level position, with the express purpose of offering her the entry level job. I successfully pawned it off on someone else, and gave less than 2 weeks notice. This was less than one month after my boss had been fired for refusing to fire an employee for asking for FMLA for a protected health condition.

  386. CJ Cregg*

    This isn’t “unreasonable” but it was definitely the most bizarre thing for the most needy boss: he called me to ask what time it was.
    Yes, he called me from his cell phone.

    1. La Triviata*

      At a previous job, they’d hired someone who’d retired from the federal government and then taken a job in the private sector. He was used to having women jump to fulfill his requests and pretty much refused to do anything other than a very narrowly defined description of his job. He once walked over to me asking about a phone number or address for someone. When I pointed to the directory he was standing in front of, he was DEEPLY offended that I didn’t jump up and look it up for him … and then write it down so he wouldn’t have to heft the directory himself.

      1. Genius with Food Additives*

        A former (female) boss got an email from the (male) Director of Sales asking for her email. He was later demoted and she was promoted.

        Same guy would also ask the person who covered the front desk/did marketing to fax clipped out articles from trade publications to the sales team. In the era of smart phones. When they were on the road a good 75% of the time. And most, if not all, of the trade publications were online anyway. She did not.

  387. Alice Ulf*

    The very small (and very cheap) nonprofit video documentary production company with which I did my internship had rented an old Victorian house in a fairly swanky neighborhood as their office. One of the managers was not-so-secretly living in the top floor of this house because… Honestly I have no idea why, but it went on the entire six months or so that I worked there.

    Anyway, she approached me one afternoon and voluntold me to clean the hot tub out on the back patio of this office/house. For business reasons, apparently.

    Reader, I did not do it.

    They had a number of other interns from various universities around the city, and I’m very sorry to say that I think one of them DID do it, which just illustrates the way they did business in general and the way they misused their interns in particular. I’ve just tried to look them up for the first time in probably a decade and it looks like they do not exist anymore, so…win. :D

  388. don't try to steal my code anon*

    At my previous elem. school (I’m the library tech), we had a principal that I privately referred to as the “Pointy Haired Principal” (PHP) because in many ways she was as bad/worse than Dilbert’s pointy haired boss. To the point of getting in screaming matches with teachers in the hallway while students were there. Or telling me she “felt” me roll my eyes at her when I sat in a staff meeting once.

    At that time, I had created and maintained the school’s website and apart from some premade scripts for dropdown menus, I’d coded that thing by hand. Anyhow, the PHP was taking a tech course–possibly making webpages, but I can’t really remember. What I do remember is her emailing me and asking for all the code on the website–I was pretty sure she was going to pass my work off as her own for this course. So I sent her everything, except the code for the drop down menus (which would cripple it for navigating). She never did ask me for them…. (It was the…principle of the thing, not that my website was anything out of the ordinary.)

  389. mc*

    I had a summer work study job living and helping build hiking trails at my college’s biology field station, which was located on an undeveloped island in an inlet of the Pacific ocean. One day, another crew member and myself were told we had a new task – we had to transport a LIVE GOAT in an small open outboard motor boat across the water from our island to another nearby island.

    The goat, which was an adult full size female, and not pygmy, was REALLY not interested in getting into the small boat. We finally just lifted it bodily into the boat while it complained loudly. Then, for the entire 45 min trip to the other island, the goat insisted on remaining standing up, legs athwart and bleating madly, while the boat rocked back and forth. It fell to me to try to control the goat by hanging onto it’s horns and the rope around its neck, since my friend had his hands full operating the outboard motor and steering our small boat through the waves without dumping all of us overboard. Did I mention that the goat was almost the same size as I was?

    When we neared the other island, the goat succeeded in shaking me off and leapt right out of the boat and into the water. Fortunately, all it wanted was to get onto dry ground again; it swam to the beach and stood around patiently waiting for us. We beached the boat to shouts of laughter from the small crowd that had gathered in response to the noise. Fortunately, two farmhands had also come with their truck to collect the goat, so we were able to hand her over with relief.

  390. The Other Evil HR Lady*

    I’m an HR department of one, me, and I’ve told everyone, ad nauseum, that I suck at recruiting – it’s just not my forte. Recruiting is like selling and I hate sales. I don’t like to sugarcoat it, because I don’t want to have recruiting be set as a goal that I will not reach. So I get help from others in the company.

    My company has a hard time hiring for non-skilled crew – think construction, and we just need bodies to swing hammers. So, my CEO (who’s my direct supervisor) and a VP came up with the “brilliant” idea of making up sticky notes with the company’s phone number. The idea was to put the sticky notes on cars at supermarket parking lots, or Walmart parking lots, you get the idea.

    That never happened, we had tons of stickies and we were low on personnel. Unbeknownst to me, VP had another idea: let’s cross out the company’s phone number, put HR’s personal cell number (I’m bilingual – that’s important), and put the sticky notes on the cars in the parking lot of the flea market where the Latinx community likes to shop on Sundays. WITHOUT TELLING ME!

    I began getting phone calls from odd numbers on a Sunday morning, all of which I would reject because… I didn’t know who was calling! Finally, I answered one of them to see what/who/where… maybe there was an emergency? Nope, just some rando asking me for a job. Remember, I know know nothing about where the stickies have been placed, or that they were placed at all. I tell the guy to stop by our office to fill out an application on Monday, and he says it’s too far. The flea market was actually about an hour away from our office.

    Anyway, Monday rolls around, and I tell everyone that I’m not answering those random calls – that I gave my cell number to the company so that employees could call for emergencies, not random people on the street – no matter if I’m the only person who speaks Spanish. I don’t HAVE to answer those calls on Sunday! I could have done so on Monday like always.

    Come to find out that the employees who posted the stickies on the cars were run out of the flea market by the market’s owner because one has to ask permission and pay a fee to do that kind of soliciting at their flea market. The owner called MY cell phone and left me the nastiest message, laden with profanities and telling ME not to ever show up at the flea market again – and I get it. She only had my number, so she called it when she was mad at my company’s antics. When I told the CEO about the message, the CEO told me to call the owner back and ask how much it would cost to put the stickies up again. Yeah…. no. That didn’t happen.

  391. Erinwithans*

    Years ago I worked for a company that sold a very particular niche items. It did fairly well for a business of about 30 people, but no more than that. We were working on getting our items onto Amazon. Now, Amazon’s submission process at the time was a giant CSV import – you basically filled out a spreadsheet with each line for an item and include price in one field, photo in another, description etc. It’s pretty massive, but in the end you submit one big file and all your info was parsed and your items would go up on Amazon.

    My boss was a complete jerk who thought the world ought to revolve around him, and he demanded that I call up our Amazon rep and demand that we be allowed to submit information differently (he didn’t even really have a why, he just really didn’t like the giant spreadsheet and didn’t understand it). I pushed back, saying that Amazon – AMAZON – was not going to change their submission process for a company our size. My boss shook his head and told me this was an example of why I’d never succeed at business.

    (I did, with apologies, mention it to our Amazon rep. We had a good laugh.)

  392. WantonSeedStitch*

    OK, so this is a small thing. Really small. It wasn’t difficult, it wasn’t particularly time-consuming, and it wasn’t the worst thing about this job by a long shot. But it was pretty ludicrous because of how small it was.

    At a job years and years ago, my boss would order a bunch of binder clips in with his Staples order. When they arrived, he had me bend back the tabs on all of them, so he didn’t have to do so himself before opening them to use them. I understand it’s probably more efficient for him to be able to grab the clip with one hand and use it immediately, but…really?

    His executive assistant and I also had to carry heavy bags full of our bulk marketing collateral to the central post office of the city to have it processed for mailing. By hand. It was about 3/4 mile, and that was a LOT to carry. I think we may have eventually gotten a little cart to make it easier, but I remember doing that walk and how exhausted we were after. We were both in our 20s and able-bodied. I’m not sure what he would have done if that hadn’t been the case. He never suggested we take a cab or offered to drive us in the car that he always parked not far from the office.

  393. Elle Woods*

    I worked at a retail clothing chain store for a hot minute in the mid-90s. There were numerous red flags that this was a poorly managed place from the moment I started but I needed the job, so I ignored them. We were constantly pressured to encourage customers to sign up for the company’s credit card. The final straw came when my manager asked me to process a credit card app for her sister who was 14 and had a significant cognitive disorder. I refused and put in my two week notice at the end of my shift. I was never on the schedule after that.

  394. SoManyCats*

    Long time lurker, but I had to comment. I worked in a very niche job in motion pictures. Tiny staff, labor intensive computer work, insane deadlines. We were paid as free-lancers, per job, so our bosses could avoid providing benefits etc. When I was diagnosed with cancer, my boss assured me I could take as much time as I needed for treatment and other staff would take over projects I couldn’t do. Two days before I start treatment, she calls me and tells me it wasn’t “fair” for the other staff to do the really hard projects because they’d be slow at it and wouldn’t make enough money. This boss proofed my work before it was submitted to the clients and I suspect she just didn’t want her work to be harder because lesser skilled people would do it. Like an idiot, I agreed and went to treatment in the mornings, then started work when I got home (I always worked at home) on insanely difficult projects, not finishing until nine at night usually. This went on for months.

  395. Strong Independent Acid Snake*

    Years ago I worked as an Assistant Director in a daycare- looking back now I know I only got the job because no knowledgeable early years professional would have wanted to go within 500 meters of the woman who ran the business, but I was young (early 20s) and excited to “move up the career ladder”.

    AB (Awful Boss) was just a walking bundle of red flags- she would say inappropriate things about the parents, children and staff to me- including that if any of the Daycare Teachers disclosed to me they were pregnant I should tell her immediately so she could convince them to have an abortion because it “would be for the best. You’ve seen what the staff are like”. She would humiliate staff for innocuous transgressions like taking building blocks outside for the children to play with (“What kind of moron takes blocks outside. Everyone knows blocks are INSIDE toys only. Tell me are you stupid, incompetent or both?”) and would write people up for minor mistakes so she could remind them how close they were to be being terminated.

    But her worst poison was saved for Andy (not his real name) and his family. Our daycare was in a very deprived area of town, and all our families were on some kind of government support. Andy’s family was “famous” in our area because they had 12 children meaning they were getting a lot of benefits. AB clipped a hostile news article from the local paper about Andy’s family getting “freebies” from the government and hung it in the staff room. She told me if the family were ever late paying their monthly bill I should immediately contact a collections agency because she knew they were “absolutely rolling in it”. She called them “scum” and “frauds” and made it clear she thought the children were awful because they came from a big family that took government assistance.

    Andy was a sweet boy, but suffered from some developmental delays- his speech was nowhere near where it should have been for his age so I asked AB if I could reach out to the family and start the process of getting Andy assessed for speech therapy. She told me not to bother because “Look at him. What’s the point of getting someone to spend any effort on him when he’s going to end up just like his family? You cannot make a silk purse out of a sows ear”- that would almost be the most unreasonable thing I have been asked to do. To ignore a child in need of support and refuse to try and help them. But the next day we were sitting down for lunch and Andy kept getting out his chair, we’d bring him back to the table, he’d leave. This happened 3 or 4 times and I suggested that maybe we let Andy go and play with some quiet toys like puzzles since he clearly wasn’t interested in eating. AB was walking past the door and overheard me, she went to her office and came back with a set of reins (a harness with straps that you can out on a child if you’re going out for a walk and don’t want them to run anyway). She told me to clip Andy into the harness and TIE him to the chair. There was a silence. “I don’t think I understand what you want me to do” I told her. She held the reins up again “Tie. Him. To. The. Chair. Then he can’t get up” she told me.

    I have never been so scared in my life- this woman terrified me and she knew it. But I could not bring myself to tie a child to a chair. I stuttered something about that being against our Licensing Regulations -which forbid certain types of punishment or restraints. Esp. if the purpose is to humiliate the child which this clearly was. And that if there was a fire or emergency I would be unable to get Andy out quickly and safely. There was an silence and AB said “So to be clear you are ignoring my direction?” I nodded. “I see” AB said and walked away.

    Within the next 2 weeks she had tried to write me up/find enough “evidence” to fire me multiple times and I had interviewed for 3 different jobs and accepted an offer to start ASAP. I was still on my probation period so I didn’t have to give her any notice. I handed my notice in on a Tuesday and started my new job on the Wednesday. On my last day I phoned the Child Care Licensing Board and told them everything that I had witnessed in that place that I knew was against the regulations. I also contacted Andy’s family with the details of how to get the ball rolling on starting speech therapy.

    I hope he is doing OK.

    1. WantonSeedStitch*

      Holy crap, this is AWFUL. I hope AB got her license revoked. What a terrible garbage nightmare human. Andy and his family are lucky you were there.

  396. Worldwalker*

    Mea Culpa ….

    When I was much younger, and a retail manager, I used to have an employee stop by the pet store on his lunch to get a bag of live crickets for my pet gecko.

    It’s undoubtedly not the most unreasonable thing any boss has ever done — I know in advance there are going to be some doozies in these comments — but it might be in the running for the weirdest. (and before anyone asks: Tokay)

    1. SpaceySteph*

      If it was his lunch break and not getting paid that’s pretty rude but I would love to get paid to hang out at the pet store

  397. I read corny books*

    I worked for a small medical company. My coworker was a medical illustrator. She had degrees in kinesiology and graphic design. The business owner asked her to design a building for one of the other business he owned. She knew nothing about architecture, but she had to send mockups of a building design (exterior and interior, plus landscape architecture for the grounds). I remember the owner wanted the building to be shaped like a flower.

  398. Box of Kittens*

    When I was in high school I worked at an ice cream shop at the main plaza downtown where I grew up. The manager was not great, but not awful. Sometimes when it got really, really busy, we would run out of cups and have to borrow some from one of the restaurants on the square. One night, though, we got absolutely slammed and ran out of cups with no extra staff available to go beg for some cups next door. My manager actually looked me in the eye and suggested I get cups *out of the garbage can* to wash and reuse. I was so young and naive that I was unsure whether she was serious, so instead of doing that I went to my team lead, who was a college student, and told her what our manager had asked. I’m not sure what words were said, but that team lead left the shop a few weeks after. And I did not return the next summer.

    1. Susie*

      There is a rumor in our town that our local DQ does this and it has been around for like 20 years so I’m not sure if it’s a rumor or not. I know that I cannot force myself to go because of this.

  399. Just Jo*

    Many years ago I was working as a process engineer for a car parts company that supplied the Big 3 automakers. The whole place was super sketchy – for example, my boss had us pretend to work when the grandboss came by, even though we didn’t have enough work to keep all the engineers busy, and my boss was having an affair with another staff member. One day my manager told me to load up the trunk of a company car with “good” parts, drive to one of the Big 3 plants, bring in the good parts and replace (ie basically steal) the “bad” parts. To make things worse I live in Canada and the plant was in the US so I had to cross the border and go through customs. I was super nervous but brand new to the work world so I did it. Luckily I got through customs without any problems. I did get lost on the way to the plant and stopped at a motel to get directions. The motel didn’t have an office – they just had a speaker you could use to talk to the office staff and a metal tray that the office staff could open and close so that you could pay for your room and they could pass you the key. I stood there talking into the speaker asking for directions and worrying that I was about to get mugged or shot. I finally found my way to the plant. My boss (who had flown in) met me in the parking lot and helped me bring in the good parts. We dumped bins of bad parts out and carried them out the car. I was shocked that there was no security, and no one batted an eye at us (it was off-hours so no cars were being built at the time, plus the bad parts had been “quarantined” in a separate part of the factory away from the line). My boss then told me to go to the “cage”, the area where they kept samples of bad parts with red tags on them, and steal the red-tagged part so that there would be no record of the quality failure. I was terrified that a security guard would come in and arrest me! Luckily no one came in and I was able to get the part. I still can’t believe I did it! Luckily I was able to quit that job a few months later and move to a much larger and more reputable automotive parts maker, and I even got a raise.

    1. irene adler*

      Holy cow! The confusion of whomever came in the next morning to the missing red-tagged parts had to have been priceless!

      1. Em*

        OP’s office produced/supplied/ok’d parts to the factory that turned out to be bad. To cover up the office’s failure, the boss ordered the bad parts replaced with good ones without permission from the factory. So now the factory doesn’t have any actual bad parts from the office, so they can’t “prove” the office supplied bad parts.

  400. Trillian Astra*

    Many years ago I was asked to do some environmental sampling at an abandoned site in Camden, NJ. Back then, this was a VERY unpleasent town, and the abandoned site was in the most unpleasant part of it. During the site briefing, the project manager told me that the local cops had told him to “borrow a gun and keep it in the glove box” just in case something were to happen at the site. I was told “you’re white, so no one will look twice at you even if it’s not registered to you”. I was then told, that if I had to shoot someone, to make sure I drag the body to the sidewalk “that way it’s the city’s problem, not yours”. Like, EXCUSE ME WHAT. At the time I laughed it off – until I was at said abandoned site one day by myself (par for the course to go solo, which is awful) and I heard vagrants in the building. I got scolded for leaving that day without finishing the work.

    I was a female in my early 20’s, again – to stress this point – working ALONE in an abandoned building in a rough part of a bad city. I honestly don’t know how I survived. Once my Project Manager was coming to the site because I didn’t feel comfortable being there solo and he got robbed by a prostitute two blocks from the site. Sigh.

  401. anon today*

    My coworker (NOT my boss, but a team lead) tried to convince me to work a last minute 15-hour shift. The shift would have ended at 11pm and I would have had to report back the next morning at 8am. This was not a job that required long hours (we didn’t work in a hospital or anything), and it involved outdoor manual labor. He also wanted me to require our interns to work that 15-hour shift as well! I stood my ground (for a 30 minute argument) and got a lecture about how I would “go further professionally if I was less picky with my personal time and more committed to the job”. He wanted to work those hours so we could to take Friday off. This was a seasonal position. I almost walked out on the spot and did end up leaving a month or so after. He couldn’t understand why I had a problem with that.

  402. Res Admin*

    Early in my career, working as a Business Manager for a small department at a large university: We were interviewing candidates for an open position (purchasing, fiscal work, etc–mid level position) and after talking to a number of candidates, I had a couple that I thought had a lot of potential. One in particular sounded particularly good.

    I was new in that department and one of the junior level people who had been there forever was sitting in on the interviews with me. She made a comment about the Department Chair not liking that candidate but wouldn’t say why. Made no sense to me, so I didn’t think much of it. Apparently she mentioned this candidate to the Chair.

    Long story short, end of day, Chair comes into my office, shuts the door and starts the conversation off with, “If you tell anyone I said this, I will deny it.” before proceeding to rant about how we would not be hiring people (he used some much less polite terms) from a specific demographic because “they” were all drug dealers, thieves, etc. and he did not want that in “his” department. I was shocked speechless. And horrified.

    I hired a totally useless git because he was very white, male, etc. He was a total cock up–as I knew he would be. I then took extended leave and found a new position ASAP–but not before telling one of the higher level Deans (who I had known and worked with or adjacent to for several years) exactly what happened. Along with the tidbit that the rumor mill said that an EEOC audit was coming.

    That man still ranks up there as one of the biggest jackasses I have ever had the misfortune to deal with.

  403. Wink*

    I used to work for a NP org with a batshit boss (also the CEO)…

    We were pilot testing some equipment for another organization that we worked closely with when my boss had a falling out with the CEO of the other organization.

    She asked our office manager and myself to pack up and send all of the equipment we were testing back to them… but to individually wrap every individual piece of the equipment separately in bubble wrap and tape it securely so it would be as annoying as possible to unwrap. She seemed so pleased with herself as she watched us do it.

    Unfortunately, she never got less petty.

  404. Yams*

    I’d forgotten this completely.

    I was working on closing a though deal and was very stressed, the sales manager told me to watch porn and go rub one out in the bathroom to calm down.
    I’m so happy he was fired (for completely unrelated reasons).

  405. zlionsfan*

    This wasn’t asked directly of me but I was part of it, you’ll see as the story unfolds.

    At First Job, we had call centers in various places around the country, in addition to one in our building and one in a city a couple of hours away. We worked pretty closely with call center management there, so one day we scheduled a trip for our team to go visit, meet the management team (again, in some cases), etc. Since it was a reasonably long trip during a business day, we planned to arrive at work a bit early and leave a bit late, but also not work a full day since we’d be in a van for four hours (I don’t recall if it was rented or owned by someone, doesn’t matter). Something like arriving at work by 7:30 and being back by 5:30, so not too bad for most but a little rough for me since I worked 9-6 (although leaving 30 minutes early would be nice).

    We get to the office, pile in the van, drive up, no problems. Meet the folks, do some work, get in the van, head back toward the office. About 30 minutes into the trip, Sansa says to the driver, “ok, this is my exit coming up.”

    Everybody goes quiet. exit? your exit? and?

    Sansa lived 60-90 minutes from work; it turned out that instead of driving to work that morning, she’d had her husband drop her off at work, expecting that we’d just drop her off at home on the way back, but without telling anyone that she’d planned this or even mentioning before the minute she needed to let us know.

    Since we were all pretty much peers and there wasn’t a manager in the car (Sansa also had quite a temper – yelling in the office, slamming her phone in its cradle after a call that didn’t go well, that sort of thing), and the driver was a nice guy, nobody told her no, so we just … drove to her house and dropped her off, then drove back to the highway and continued the trip. It added about an hour to an already-long day. When we finally got back to the office, we piled out of the van, went straight to our cars and headed home without a word.

    Within a year or so, the company had a difficult financial year and had to do some layoffs, and Sansa was let go. Can’t say that anyone missed her.

  406. not that kind of Doctor*

    I was at my first accounting job – had been about 6 months – on 9/11/2001. My boss wanted me to apply for small business relief funds. We were in California; we had one or two wholesale customers in NY who were affected, but the resulting impact to us was tiny. I knew we were not eligible, and I knew she knew, and at least she didn’t straight-up ask me to lie. I think I filled out the paperwork in a cursory way and left it for her to complete & sign. I expect she never did.

  407. Purple Penny*

    At the Mildly Dysfunctional Warehouse we are one big, happy family, with all that implies. I just sit back and enjoy the chaos, and get my work done as best I can. I don’t mind running errands (picking up kids, delivering cats to the vet, swinging by the grocery store, etc.) as long as it’s on the clock and on their dime. Other than that, I am firm about what I will and won’t do, and that includes no weekends.

    However, other employees are not so firm in their boundaries, so there has, for instance, been house-sitting when the bosses are on holiday, and all sorts of other things I am vaguely aware of but not entirely privy to, and that’s fine. I’d honestly rather not know. Nothing too awful – the boss people are thoughtless rather than malicious –but they all gossip when they work together, a lot of personal information gets exchanged, everyone’s friends on social media, and it makes life a lot harder when they later have to do boss things, and their employees are upset because they’re no longer being treated as friends. I stay out of this drama as much as possible.

    The bosses also frequently have their employees work at their large house, set in its own grounds, when on-site business is slow, doing everything from gardening to general household maintenance. Which is how, one day, several of the male employees set off with a trailer, with a small back hoe loaded on it, to dig a grave in the grounds, as the boss lady’s father had died recently, but before doing so had expressed a desire to be buried at the property because it was so beautiful.

    There’s an art to digging a grave, and they were not grave diggers by profession. Apparently it was a bit of a struggle, even with a back hoe, but they managed it in the end. And then had to go back a few days later to fill in in the hole after its final occupant had been deposited there. Without a back hoe this time because funeral guests. They returned later, looking distinctly squicked out by the whole process.

    1. Lucy Honeychurch*

      I really enjoyed this one hahahaha. I also think I wouldn’t mind working too much at Mildly Dysfunctional Warehouse, as long it is truly “Mildly.”

      I’ve always enjoyed working with oddballs, doing the odd things, and don’t mind errands. Most people hate it, but I like it. You sound pretty entertained, too. :)

  408. Honest Bellionaire*

    I work for the Army as a civil service employee. I got a call from an elderly-sounding woman demanding that I “do something” about the house across the street because it was an eyesore. Phone numbers on the base changed regularly back then because they were playing musical cubicles so I have no idea whose number it was when she received it and all she knew was “it’s the government” so we were supposed to help her. I attempted to explain the difference between Federal and city government to her but she kept demanding that I had to be able to do something. I suggested contacting city hall and she refused to believe I didn’t have their number myself. Because, after all, it’s all government. I finally told her to look it up in the phone book (this would have been around 2005 and she sounded like she was in the demographic that would actually keep their phone books) and she finally accepted that as an answer.

    I hung up, and all of my coworkers wanted to know what the call was about because they had only heard my side. Definitely the weirdest thing that’s happened to me at work and I have worked with some really weird people.

  409. Artemis*

    Once I had to drive 2 hours to an affordable housing development to drop off thousands of dollars of tech that my boss told me to include in the funding request (we were funded by grants and tax credits), but secretly stored away for personal use. I quit soon after.

  410. STG*

    I worked for a call center that required that we use fake names or aliases if someone else at the call center had the same name. We were assigned these names. It was a very frat bro type company and I commented that I’d find it difficult to remember a name that wasn’t my own. I was concerned that my immediate impulse would be to say My name is STG without thinking.

    As a result of that conversation, my new manager decided it would be funny to give me the name Adolf because ‘it would be memorable’. It took less than 2 hours on the phone before I couldn’t handle it anymore. It was uncomfortable and awkward and some customers made comments. Shortest job I ever had.

  411. Barista*

    I worked alone at a coffee shop. One day, the boss had me kick the customers out, close the store, and walk 2 blocks to pick up his daughter’s sunglasses from the McDonalds lost and found.

  412. Another Random Internet Person*

    When working for a department called “The Center for Ethics” I was told to use a shortened version of my “foreign” name because one of the (old, white) donors found my full name was too difficult to say. Surprisingly, given my young age and career and timidity at the time, I declined.

    1. Loredena Frisealach*

      I’m glad you were able to push back!

      I work with a large number of off shore teams – India currently, Vietnam at my last place. Thus far it’s always been a case of I’m joining a team they are already part of and my USian coworkers are doing the introductions. So so often they are introduced by shortened versions of their names, and I have *no* idea if they introduced themselves that way to start, like the nickname, or just suck it up because US. Drives me crazy.

  413. Scorbunny*

    I worked in collegiate retail, and one day, my boss came in with an mp3 of a 30 second long clip of the school band playing the fight song. We had an aging Frankenstein’s monster of a PA system that could sometimes play the radio, and there was actually a USB input on part of it. Boss asked me to get the 30 second long mp3 to play over the PA for game days. I said something along the lines of, “oh, do you want to play it every hour?” and to my horror, the answer was that she wanted it on a constant and unending loop. A 30 second long loop of the same song, over and over and over again for hours while we were all working mandatory overtime. I could not make her see reason as to why repeating this same clip that often would get very old very fast. She genuinely could not see what the problem was.

    I decided that I did not want to commit a war crime against my coworkers, told her I’d get right on that, took the clip, and went about doing other things and generally killing time in a back office. After about an hour or so, I went back to her and told her so sorry, I couldn’t do it, the PA system was just too old and the thing with the USB input was dead. Fortunately, the PA system was flaky enough that she didn’t question this, even in light of my earlier misgivings.

  414. ResuMAYDAY*

    I had a boss who had diabetes. She planned a surprise meeting for us where she expected everyone to give themselves a shot of saline, so that we could know how to inject her (with insulin) if she ever needed us to.
    It was a small office; I believe there were only 4 other employees. As her assistant, I was the first one she turned to. I refused to give myself a shot. Not only am I afraid of needles, but my job description did NOT include volunteering for unnecessary medical procedures! It was bat-s**t crazy. I was fired a short time later and when I complained to the home office, they offered me my job back (I refused) and she was fired shortly thereafter.

  415. Alice Simpson*

    I had a former boss direct me to expense his family’s trip to Sea World in San Diego on his Heart and Stroke grant.

    I said no.

  416. Anon Temp*

    I was temping, filling in for the office’s receptionist. The hiring manager gave me a package of unlined index cards and asked to me draw lines on them since they needed lined index cards. Dropped a stack of cards, a ruler, and a pencil on my desk and then left. I was completely gobsmacked. After a few moments, I walked back to the manager’s desk and pointed out that I could pick up a package of lined index cards for about $1.29 and if they needed me to, I could drive over to the store and buy one. The hiring manager just said, “yeah, that makes more sense,” took the blank index cards, and turned away.

  417. Mags*

    My boss was a vegan. She had me cut any pictures of meat products out of any magazine/paper that came into the office. And if I had a sandwich that had meat in it I had to go into the cloakroom and eat it in there out of sight. From pure spite I used to get the biggest, most aromatic bacon sandwiches I could find, heat them in a toastie pocket, and eat them right next to the door.

  418. Just Like A Carrot*

    I know this isn’t about a job, but I once had a college instructor who would just constantly ask students to do inappropriate things for her, including: routinely asking me, specifically, to take her garbage out to the bins in the hall since the classrooms didn’t have bins for some reason; routinely asking to use students’ cell phones to call her brother since she didn’t have a cell phone; and asking me one time to enter the whole class’s grades for an assignment into the system??? There is no way I should have been seeing those! One time I had a cold and decided I was tired of her shit, so I said no to the first favour she asked me to do, and she proceeded to ask for two more (all of which I said no to).

    Eventually she made us come in just for her class during our spring break, so everyone commuted in from significant distances (there was no residence option since our program was technically on another school’s campus), only for her to literally just take attendance and then let us leave. She literally did not have a class to teach us that day and just wasted hours of our time on the commute. I know I’m veering even more off topic now, but this was really the cherry on top.

  419. Lucy Honeychurch*

    One of my first jobs was at a fast food chicken restaurant (a local chain, not a national one). If a piece of chicken fell on the floor and a customer didn’t see, we were instructed to not throw it away but toss it back under the heat lamp. Our manager would laugh and call it, “Chicken A La Floor.”

    1. I'm just here for the cats!*

      For a short time when i was a kid my mom worked at a local diner. She would reuse the styerfoam cups! My mom only worked there for like 3 months. It closed soon afterwards.

      She also charged for water and accused my mom of giving me food when I had paid for it. she hadn’t even checked me out.

      The restaurant was great, best ice cream ever, but the lady was crazy!

  420. Lady Ann*

    Once my workplace was having an audit of sensitive information. Outside auditors had come on and were using one of our conference rooms. The room was to be locked at all times when the auditors were not present. One day I was in charge of closing the office I got a phone call from one of the higher ups. She had accidentally taken the key to the room home with her. Rather than her coming back in with the key, I was instructed to pretend to lock the door when the auditors left for the day.

    Luckily when they left, they just said “we’re leaving, make sure you go lock the door” and did not watch me do it so I didn’t actually have to lie to them.

  421. Nice Pants*

    Early in my career as a Legal Assistant, I was assigned to one particularly difficult attorney. Very old school. One day he calls me into his office and asks if I can make a label for him to send back some pants he had ordered. So I said sure, went and printed the label and found a box. I go back into his office and there is a pair of pants folded on his desk. The pants he had been WEARING! I assumed he had put on another pair of pants he had with him so I and took the pants on his desk, put them in the box, dropped them in our mailroom and went on with my day. This happened close to the end of the day, but he apparently did not have another pair of pants and didn’t think about how he was going to get home with no pants. He must have called his wife, who then called me, completely appalled that he had given me his worn pants to send off. She apologized profusely and told me that she was NOT bringing him another pair of pants and he could figure it out on his own. I left for the day and have no idea how he managed to get home, sans pants.

    1. Jaid*

      My grandmother once returned a coat to K-Mart. She’d been wearing it, in winter and ended up calling my father for a ride home.
      One of the lovely symptoms of dementia.

  422. Ladyyourenuts*

    Our company was the process of building some new office buildings and slowly moving us out of the old ones so they could be demolished. I had a boss who wanted me to outfit one of the old empty buildings as a bomb shelter–bottled water, canned goods, the whole 9 yards. This was not too terribly long after 911 and movies about nuclear winter were a trend. Her idea was if a nuclear bomb was dropped, we could take shelter in that old building…nevermind that we weren’t likely to get a head’s up if something like that were about to happen, or that the buildings were in no way radiation or bomb proof. They were 1 all story, no basements, and there was also a huge air intake vent on each of the roofs that couldn’t be closed (we had to evacuate the building due to smoke once because of a nearby cookout). I was pretty young and I think I actually guffawed at the absurd request, then just ignored it. I figured if I knew a bomb was coming I’d be trying to make it home to my family not hiding in a moldy old building with a crazy woman.

  423. Happy*

    Way back, age 20 or so, I got put smack dab in the middle of 2 feuding managers. Manager 1 sent me to give a message to Manager 2. He didn’t like the message so sent me with a reply back to #1. Back and forth I went a few times until I decided to just go do my actual work. Eventually I got yelled at by BOTH of them for “dropping the ball”. Yes, I did, but sheesh!
    In another job at age 17, I put in notice. On my last day the admittedly very handsome and married (I think) manager, asked me into the office. He proceeded to give me a VERY passionate good-bye kiss. OMG!

  424. 1st Time Caller*

    I was asked to falsify documents and reports for an EEOC complaint about 2 years ago. I was contracted at a company to clean up their accounting system after their bookkeeper was let go. She filed an EEOC complaint against the company for sexual harassment and general harassment. The owner and GM wanted me to change documents and delete all records of complaints that she had lodged. The huge issue (other than it being totally illegal) was that she was right. The owner listened to extreme right wing talk shows at blaring volume all day and left pamphlets for his church in the breakroom and on everyone’s desks weekly. The GM liked to talk about how he “converted lesbians” and would complain about people and state their race in the conversation and say “But I have black friends, so not all of them are bad.”. Super toxic environment. I quit that week and let her lawyer know about their shenanigans. I heard that they closed about 6 months later.

  425. Oh Behave!*

    I worked at a public high school. The principal asked me to change a final semester grade to an A from C. This student was an athlete and the grade would look bad on his transcripts! I refused and told him I would need the teacher to come to me herself to sign a grade change form. I knew if found out, the principal would blame me. I told my boss and the kids counselor.

    I had a skeevy feeling about this guy from the minute I met him. He lasted a year.

  426. kowl*

    Many years ago, I was an admin at a very small automotive safety research company which also provided expert witness testimony in car crash cases. One such case involved a collision with a horse. As part of the research for the project, Boss wanted to experimentally determine the friction between the horse and the hood of that car model to then feed into the simulation. So, he needed some horse hide. However, he felt that absolutely this could not be cured or tanned horse hide. It needed to be fresh/untreated. So this became my job for a week or two – calling vets/shelters/slaughterhouses/etc etc etc to ask if they had any freshly dead horses lying around and if so could we please buy their skin. It. Was. Horrible. I felt like such an enormous creep.

    Also – somehow I did actually track one down! I have no memory of how. Except that now we had a giant box (probably 3-4ft tall & wide) of horse skin that wasn’t preserved, so it needed to be kept cold. This was a small company in a small building so storage options were limited. We did, however, have what was essentially a supercomputer for all the crash simulations, so it had its own refrigerated room in the building. So the horse hide lived with the supercomputer, at least until I left the company. I don’t know if they ever even ran the simulations.

  427. Won’tHappenAgain*

    Valentine’s Day. My husband and I were at a fancy restaurant, had been waiting to be seated for over an hour. We had just sat down and ordered. My phone rings and my boss’ boss insisted I get on a phone call with a customer Right.Now to discuss an urgent project call. My husband said he would stay and get the food. In retrospect, we should have just told the restaurant we needed to leave or I should have told my grand boss no. I was young… I left my husband at the restaurant to eat Valentine’s Day dinner alone and find a ride home. And the call was by no means important or urgent.

  428. Will's Mom*

    Back in 1992, I was told to go home and change because I (female) wore a very business like pantsuit to work. It was taupe and I wore a black shell underneath. I told them that if they forced me to go home, I would not come back until the next day. I was told this after lunch, and my commute was a little over an hour one way. If I hadn’t needed the job so badly, I would have said I would never come back. They did not make me go home. There was a huge kerfluffle about it, but the upshot was pantsuits for women was allowed. Mind you, this was a non Customer facing job. SMH

  429. BlaineAmanda*

    I was 22, working at my first post-college job. It was a non-profit where I worked with incarcerated/formally incarcerated individuals with HIV/AIDS. My funding was specific to HIV/AIDS services, although we had several other programs that were completely separate. I was heading out to see an incarcerated client to explain our program, and lay out his sober housing etc when my manager asked if I could do a favor while I was there.

    She asked me to see another inmate, who had previously been enrolled in another program several times and was well known to the non-profit. He had applied again, despite having proven a high likelihood of recidivism…and my supervisor wanted me to tell him he had been denied. At the time, I didn’t fully grasp the situation and thought, “sure, I’m there anyways”.

    After I see my client I’m led down to his quad, and let in by one of the guards. Being a woman, as soon as the prisoners see me (they were all in their cells), they start manically flushing their toilets, hitting the doors/walls of their cells, and yelling down to me. It was incredibly intimidating. Then the guard buzzes the inmate I’m there to see out of his cell. It slowly swings open, and a giant of a man has to duck to clear the doorway.

    This guy was 6’9, and as broad as a semi truck. His clothes didn’t even fit him correctly, I honestly do not think they made clothes large enough to fit his frame, his shirt looked like it was about to tear as if he was the Hulk. They lead me into a room and place me away from the door (in our offices the protocol was to be with our backs facing the door, with a window, so we could easily exit or someone would be able to easily look in and grab us if there was trouble). This was because the red panic button was the furthest from the door, which I was instructed to push if I needed help.

    We sit down, and I explain that he had been denied from reentry to a program I didn’t even understand and had no ties to. Also, I had only worked there for four months at this point, and this dude had been working with them for the last 20 years. He did not take it well…OBVIOUSLY. Not only was he being denied from a program that has been a saving grace in providing him with housing once released for the last 20 years, some new shiny, inexperienced child was here to tell him.

    He was SCREAMING but luckily at no point attempted to throw anything, or take it out on me personally. He was let out of the tiny conference room, and led back to his cell. It wasn’t until MUCH later when relaying that story to a friend that I realized just how totally fucked that was of my manager. A letter from the organization, from the dude that ran that program, who himself used to be incarcerated and used to run with this inmate was SO MUCH MORE APPROPRIATE then sending me as a messenger. I’d love to ask her why she thought that was appropriate now, twenty some 15 years later.

  430. Eastcoastanon*

    Long time reader, first post. Thank you for allowing me to unload this.

    I was an agent in an inbound contact center in 2008. We were not allowed to push back a call or actively end a call, EVER, no matter the circumstances. To do so meant an automatic dismissal. This was unreasonable in so many ways, we took so much abuse.

    We sat at rows of bingo-type folding tables in a huge room, agents on one side, team leads on the other. One morning, the people near my table had to wildly jump up and down to get the attention of any team lead while calmly taking calls. I sat on the dirty industrial carpeting and held the hands of the grandfatherly gentleman with whom I shared the table, and continued speaking to my caller. My table-mate had quietly slid off his chair and onto the floor, barely conscious; we found out after the ambulance left that he had had a heart attack.

    The call monitors subsequently told us we had done a good job as none of them could tell anything was amiss; that’s all that was said about it. That was cold comfort, to say the least.

  431. FACS*

    When I was 20 I worked in a law firm part time. I was a fulltime college student and can type quickly. One of the partners told me that I needed to be her son’s date for prom. “So he will have one and you will get a corsage!”. Ummm, no. I did one prom in high school and that was rather enough. Best part is Grandboss heard her yelling at me and walked by to check. When he realized what was going on he told her to zip it and leave me alone. Problem solved.

  432. Regular Human Accountant*

    The sales guy at a tech start-up tried to get me to come to a sales meeting he had set up with a potential customer who was female because, he said, “Women don’t like to be the only woman in a meeting.” This was in 2014, mind you. I said, “She works in oil & gas; I can guarantee this isn’t the first time she’s been the only woman in a meeting.”

  433. It's A Lot*

    I ( she/her) took a short-term job once in my youth that required weekend stays in a location about a 5 hour drive away. I was assured before taking the position that I would be put up in a hotel and provided meals. So I accept and drive up on Friday, check in, and there is a strange man also in my room! Turns out, he was also hired for this position and we were expected to stay in the same room for the entire weekend. I immediately contacted my boss/the person who hired me and expressed my discomfort. She reassured me that he was a friend of hers and it would be fine! I was flabbergasted, but didn’t really have another option. Most awkward weekend of my life.

    1. Raine*

      That would be an epic setup for a meet-cute movie-of-the-week but not for a real-life work scenario. Good grief. Sorry you went through that!

  434. awesome3*

    Got a request from someone who was no longer my boss, during a time of year I don’t work, while I was on my honeymoon (and they were aware it was my honeymoon). I responded by sending wedding pictures.

  435. A*

    I worked part time as a customer service rep when I was in high school. The company’s owner brought in his puppy and let it run wild. The puppy ran into the customer service area and peed on a bunch of product samples. The owner yelled at me and ordered me to clean up after the puppy and “clean up” the samples (which were paper and totally non useable at that point).

  436. Long time lurker*

    I wasn’t asked to do this by my employer, but it definitely is the strangest work-related task I’ve done – and I’ve been working for a LONG time –
    Prior to the plague, I traveled for my job. I was in the Midwest and grabbed a Lyft from the airport to the client site.
    My ride pulls up and I notice that it’s not….up to the usual standards. But, what the heck? It’s a car and it’s running, so I jump in the backseat. Lo and behold, there’s a baby (about 7 months old) in a car seat back there with me. Baby is fussy, so the driver hands me a bottle.

    What else could I do? I fed the baby for most of the 30 minute trip!

  437. Random commenter on Ask a Manager*

    My boss wanted me to “help” her with her college homework. I had just graduated college and she owned and operated her own business for 20+ years but the government required directors of that type of business to now have a bachelor’s degree. So I tried to help her but what I was telling her was wrong because how am I supposed to know. I’m not in her class. So then she tried to get me to go to class (in person) for her. I didn’t do that.

  438. The Tin Man*

    Scene: I was working for a national wellness chain. Corporate was launching an Instagram-ish social media site for members. Corporate had a contest for the individual locations for the highest percentage of getting members, new and old, to sign up.

    My boss had us just using the member e-mails we already had on file to sign people up without their knowledge. I constantly found other things to keep busy so as to “not have time” because the whole thing bothered me, though I was worn down enough by the job at that point I didn’t push back any harder. Unsurprisingly our location won, and in a random drawing I was the employee who won the grand prize of luxury box tickets to go see our local MLB team.

    I’m not sure the moral of the story, but I got free baseball, beer, hot dogs, and sushi out of it so there you have it.

    (At least I wasn’t at Wells Fargo getting pressured to create fake bank accounts with financial penalties?)

  439. Empress Matilda*

    Mine is pretty low-stakes, but it still makes me laugh years later.

    I had a boss who felt Very Strongly about document formatting – all documents had to be Portrait, no Landscape allowed. She made me reformat *everything.* Including a couple of docs that were tables, and formatted in landscape because that was the only way to make all the columns fit. So they all ended up with super-skinny columns with the words splitting over multiple lines. It was absolutely unreadable, but at least it was Portrait, dammit!

  440. Overseas worker*

    I was working for a nonprofit overseas and one of the places I worked was a transitional home for young women going from an institutional setting to regular adult life. I was in my mid 20s at the time and they were all late teens to mid 20s so we were peers, and some of them had been my friends before they started the program, but those of us on staff had pretty absolute authority over them while they were in the program. I was always uncomfortable with this but couldn’t change it.

    One of them for awhile was working at a job in the town where I lived instead of where their regular housing was. So the powers that be cooked up this idea that the one day a week that I was staying at the residential housing, she would come sleep in my room. In my apartment. A few times I was there too bcs I wasn’t on my usual shift and we both shared my queen-sized bed. Under normal circumstances I would have been fine with that since we were friends, but see above. It felt really weird to me at the time but I didn’t know enough to protest. The laws of the country we were in were more lax, but I don’t know that they were THAT much more lax. Thankfully nothing happened but it was so uncomfortable!

  441. notateacher*

    This is my first time commenting and I’m pretty excited to have something to contribute to a discussion on AAM after lurking for years. Shame it’s something so ridiculous…

    Like many industries and companies, my previous day job was hit hard by the pandemic. As a perma-lancer who held an important position within this small company, I was in a weird position. I was highly valued for the work I did (not valued enough to made a permanent employee or get a raise, mind you), but I was not guaranteed hours. Some weeks I would be busy and some weeks I would have almost nothing to do.

    My boss (owner of the company) was very cognizant of the situation and was trying his best to come up with things I could do for more hours. I’m generally a versatile, flexible, easy-going person capable of wearing many hats, so sometimes I’d say yes, and sometimes I’d say I didn’t think it was a good fit and thank him for the opportunity.

    Until the day he said he’d had a great idea to get me LOTS of hours.

    I could teach his kids.

    Some things you should know about me:
    -I don’t have a teaching background. Like not even close to anything like that.
    -I don’t have kids, nor do I want them.
    -I’ve never worked with kids.
    -I’d never met my boss’s kids, didn’t know anything about them other than that they existed, and didn’t even live in the same time zone as them.
    -Did I mention I’m not a teacher?!?

    I actually laughed at my boss, I was so surprised that this was his brilliant idea. Then I politely explained that I didn’t think it would be a good fit for me. He kept asking if I was sure, because it would be so many hours!

    I don’t know what was more ridiculous, the fact that he thought I would be qualified to help with his kids’ remote schooling, or the fact that he didn’t think it would a really weird boundary to cross to have me, his employee, also be his kids’ tutor!

    There were various other ridiculous requests during that job, but this was the one that really drove home for me the fact that I should start looking for other opportunities!

  442. Veruca*

    I worked in the office of a manufacturing plant in Michigan. My boss asked me to find him some women (specifically) not eligible to legally work in the US to work that he could hire under the table in the factory. He made it clear that he intended to pay them less and deny any benefits.

    I quit. He was gross.

  443. I'm just here for the cats!*

    So this kind a fits in as an unreasonable request. After college, I worked in an inbound call center that answered calls for a cell company. We were not allowed to hang up on callers NO MATTER WHAT! They would scream, call you names, all sort of abuse and you were supposed to smile and take it. I was actually told once to smile on the call because the “Customers can hear it”.

    I worked late, sometimes didn’t leave until after 1 a.m. and of course after 7 p.m. the loonies call. I (female, with a young-sounding voice) was forced to listen to people being sexually explicit on the phone. For some reason I got the majority of the calls ( it was kind of a running joke on my team). It was really uncomfortable. I couldn’t imagine what it was like if I had been a sexual assault victim. And I’m sure there probably were some folx in our center who had been (statistically speaking 1 in 3 women are affected by sexual abuse and we had upwards of 500 people, mostly women in the center.)

    I was thankful that about a year into that place i moved to a team where the manger didn’t take kindly to that sort of thing. If anyone had a call like that we were to notify her immediate and she would come over take the call from us and chew the guy out!

  444. MangoFreak*

    I was being trained for a maternity leave cover at a huge financial services firm. The EA I was going to cover told me she often went and picked up the boss’s soup, and that he usually gave her five bucks for it–she’d never bothered to tell him that it cost more than that.

    This guy was, legitimately, a billionaire. I was a temp without health insurance. And she expected me to subsidize his f**king soup.

    Oh and by the way I wouldn’t get a lunch break, but also wouldn’t get a lunch delivered like the full-time employees. (Because that would make it sticky for them to classify me as a temp/contractor/whatever.) I immediately called the temp agency and told them I was not going to spend 3-6 months buying a billionaire’s lunch while not getting any lunch of my own, and HR got a talking to. They snuck me onto the daily lunch purchase (I guess illegally?) and the EA finally told the billionaire how much soup costs. Eventually I explained that Hale & Hearty has a fricking app I could just plug his credit card into.

      1. Raine*

        Because that would technically classify you in the same category as a direct employee. It has to do with the big lawsuit that happened in the late 1990s/early 2000s over the fact many IT companies (Microsoft especially) hired contractors and consultants to work full-time, long-term contracts without any promise of those positions becoming direct employee positions. The direct employees often got healthcare benefits, insurance, free food, etc. while the contractors and consultants doing the same work – often in positions that would never be staffed by direct employees – got screwed (paid less, employment was at-will, no insurance, etc.) It was so blatantly discriminatory, especially since many of the IT contractors I knew were on I-9 visas and were terrified of being deported once their contract was terminated.
        Now if you’re a temporary, consultant, or contractor on a long-term contract, the company your agency contracts your work to has to be *very* clear that any perk whatsoever that you get is either a one-time thing or an extraordinary exception or has to be passed through to your agency in some negotiated way. I worked for $BIGNAME automotive firm as a long-term temp and auto firm had a clause in their contract with my agency that a certain number of holidays were paid, above the agency’s standard of none.

    2. Ginger Baker*

      This is legit not the first time I have heard of this situation and to this day I wonder “how could you function well as this person’s EA if you could not even tell them ‘lunch is $x, thanks’ and get them to pay for it? how do you work when you are that scared of the person you are supporting??” (I say as someone who has worked this role for some 20ish years and would never EVER let that fly.)

  445. Moths*

    Also not to me, but to a coworker. When I was in graduate school, I worked in the lab of a ridiculous PI. He was always lecturing us that if we weren’t completely focused and working 100% of the time that we were stealing money from the taxpayers who funded our grant. That’s just scratching the surface of his issues, but is relevant. He asked one of the lab technicians to come in the day after Christmas to help move some things. The lab tech, thinking they’d be rearranging the lab, came in and was told to clock in. He was then immediately told to get into his car and follow the PI to his house, as he needed help moving all of his stuff out into a new apartment while his wife and kid were out of town. He paid the technician from grant money to be his own personal moving company. Oh, and apparently, the wife and child had no idea until they got back into town.

    The worst that’s happened to me personally was in the job I worked during college. I was still young and didn’t know how to say no, so when the owner of the company came and told me that since I still had a few hours left until my shift ended, he needed to borrow my car to run some errands (he lived right next door to the office). His was broken and he had stuff he wanted to get done. I tried protesting a little, but he was insistent that there was really no reason why I shouldn’t let him do this. Obviously, he didn’t come back by the time my shift ended and I ended up having to call my mom to come pick me up. She was appalled and immediately drove me down the main stretch in town (it was a pretty small town) until we found my car and made me go inside and tell him that I needed my car back immediately and that I could drive him back to work and drop him there. After I got back home, she coached me on how it’s always okay to just say no to requests like that.

  446. AnonObv*

    I worked in IT for our city government and was asked by the Mayor’s admin to download the Twitter app on his work ipad one day. When I tried to get more details as to whether or not it was a technical malfunction causing him issues, I was told “No. The Mayor doesn’t download his own apps.” Spent an awkward 2 minutes going to the app store, downloading the app, and then handing the iPad back to his admin. What I consider to be even almost crazier is that to log in to his account, I was handed a post-it note from a desk drawer filled with all his passwords written on post-it’s.

  447. Chicken & Quaffles*

    Many years ago I was screamed at over the phone by an insurance broker for not going along with the absolute BS his client was trying put forward as the truth. This client was super sleazy & his story always changed. And he tried to look down my shirt all the time.

    My boss didn’t come out & say it but wanted me to lie by omission to the companies taking on the risk. And we need to backdate the coverage (never a good idea). No way, my reputation is worth more than that. Underwriters don’t forget when you screw them over. I was super stressed out, higher ups accusing me of not knowing the market, and thought I might lose my jobs without a good reference. Ugh.

    I was taken off the account. I had left very detailed notes in the file about what conversations I had when, dates & times. Why I needed more information before we could accurately present the program to the market. I didn’t say it was BS but if you were reading between the lines it was clear.

    I moved on and took a new job as an underwriter at a prestigious firm. One day I was sitting at the conference table waiting on the team of brokers who wanted to present a big new account. And the insurance broker that screamed at me walked in and saw me sitting there. The look on his face was priceless! Oh how are you? It’s a been awhile! I didn’t realize you had changed jobs! So good to see you, do you remember the nice dinner we had, blah blah blah.

    My boss was super confused why this pretty well known broker was absolutely fawning over me. It was fun to tell him the story after the meeting.

    After all that, I was eventually proven right. The sleazy client was even worse than I thought, it was total fraud. He was writing up his own insurance coverage and charging his clients for it! With no underlying insurance company taking the risk! It blew up spectacularly. The guy actually went to jail. A former coworker said my super detailed file turned out to be pretty helpful for my old employer when the fraud was investigated.

  448. CorruptedbyCoffee*

    Working fast food, I closed around 12, and then had to be back to open at 9 am. I’d worked an 8 hour day on my feet with no breaks. I got a call at 3am demanding I come in right then to clean a small pop stain off the floor near the pop machine. I suggested waiting until morning and I would take the 5 minutes to clean it up then, but the assistant manager insisted I come do it then. In the middle of the night. I gave notice instead.

    I now work as a librarian. A patron tried to get me to sell her burial plot for her. She wanted me to advertise it, give my personal number and field incoming questions and calls about it, and transfer ownership. The whole nine yards. For free. Why she thought this was a reasonable thing to ask her local library to do, I’m not sure.

    1. CW*

      You had to do that dreaded clopening shift, and they decided to take it to a whole new level. Also, what if you had fallen asleep and hadn’t been awake. It mean, it was 3am! So glad you gave notice.

      1. CorruptedbyCoffee*

        In point of fact, I was not awake when he called and it woke me up. I don’t do very well when waking (I normally require at least a half hour, a shower and a cup of coffee to respond in anything but grunts), but it was probably for the best. I don’t know if I would have had the guts to quit any other time. It was a horrible job market and only my second job ever.

  449. Dittany*

    My boss once called me into her office to tell me all about her life-long struggle with hypochondria.

  450. Sapphire (they/them)*

    In my first job, I accidentally accrued some overtime, and my boss told me to change my timesheet so it didn’t reflect the overtime. When I refused on the grounds that it was illegal, she claimed “It’s illegal to pay unauthorized overtime.” Her boss must have told her to drop it, because I never heard anything else about it.

  451. Littorally*

    Manager told me to stop going to church so I would be available to work Sunday mornings. Same manager told a coworker she should also quit her church choir because the rehearsals, which were once a week at a time that barely overlapped with our working hours, were inconvenient for him.

  452. Goldenrod*

    Years ago, my husband’s boss casually assigned him the task of installing a cafe in the base of their office building, because she thought it would be nice to be able to get lunch or coffee during the workday.

    Just to clarify – at that time, he was a mid-level office assistant, in an office doing work that had NOTHING to do with food service or anything remotely related to that (they did medical research). He had absolutely no expertise in this area, and absolutely no positional power to make it happen.

    He wisely ignored the request and moved on shortly afterwards!

  453. TransmascJourno*

    I worked at a highly dysfunctional job related to the cannabis industry, and my boss would frequently forbid us from leaving unless we got high with him. (In part, this was because he was a truly pathetic man who, by the looks of it, had no friends — but partially because he was absolutely sociopathic. This guy used to throw actual objects at my head for “bad ideas,” while stealing those exact same ideas only moments later brainstorming sessions.) He also once tried to get someone in my office to smoke out of a 3D-printed bong — except the chemicals used in 3D printing are severely toxic (at least when it comes to bong-smoking), and could have landed someone in the hospital if they attempted to do what he asked.

  454. onto greener pastures*

    I doubt anyone will read this far down but TW pet death: I once worked for an extremely sketchy pet boarding place. Due to negligence of one of the staff members, a pet died. The owner then asked me if I could DELETE THE SECURITY FOOTAGE.

    I told her I wasn’t able to do that and immediately started looking for a new job.

    1. Catnip*

      This one breaks my heart :( I have a doggo myself, and if he died at a pet boarding place due to staff negligence I would be fit to be tied. Might even consider suing. Good for you for not deleting the footage, and I’m glad you got out.

  455. AnonymousForNow*

    Not to me, but a former coworker. When I was in college, I was also working as a cashier at a local grocery store. My former coworker (let’s call her Pam), worked another job at a daycare center. Let’s just say her boss was a micromanaging hell who thought your “job should always come first”.

    Then one day, her mother had to be sent to the hospital. Pam called out of our job and her daycare job to be with her mother. A short while after that, her boss lectured about how her priorities were out of whack, and that her job must come first, and everything else must come second. When Pam told me the story, I was in complete shock. I mean, her mother had to go to the hospital. Our manager at the grocery store agreed with us, and said that the boss was more than ridiculous. Less than a month later, Pam was fired from that job, and 6 months after that, the daycare center closed down.

  456. TMImagnet*

    I came into work with my hair in a French braid, my boss asked if I did it myself, and immediately begged me to braid hers right then and there because she didn’t know how. Readers, I did it. Right in her office where we were visible to everyone who walked by. It was very weird. This was fairly early in my career at a relatively formal/stuffy office, no less. I worked for this woman for years and she constantly went over the line with her staff; she had a habit of trapping one of us in her office for hours to talk at us about all manner of inappropriate subjects. I heard more than I ever wanted to about her sex life, her adult child’s sex life, unsolicited relationship advice (coupled by prying questions about my own relationship), gossip about her family members (several of whom worked with us/in our industry), you name it. She was actually a fun person and I might have enjoyed some of our conversations if I wasn’t constantly on edge with the knowledge that she was my boss!

  457. Regina Philange*

    I used to work in TV production, so I was definitely asked to do a lot of ridiculous things. My top 2 are:

    1. I had to drive all over LA tracking down an actor who was more than an hour late to set. He was not at his house, but his boyfriend (we think) was, so I had to drive my car with the boyfriend in it, so he could show me where the actor was house sitting – across town. We get there, and said actor answers the door (after many many doorbell rings) in a towel. I had to then chastise him for being late and stand there to make sure he called the Assistant Director to tell him he was on his way.

    2. It was also my job to stock the kitchen in the production office, and I once had a knockout fight with my boss about going back to the store for peanut butter, because the Coscto-sized jar we had was only half full, so clearly we needed more right then.

    1. 40 Years in the Nonprofit Trenches*

      I am actually amazed that there are so few production stories being posted. Maybe because “unreasonable” is just not a relevant concept? (Flashing on “Burden of Dreams,” or really any making-of movie ever made.)

  458. just a thought*

    My first job out of college was with a small government contracting company that has a HORRIBLE government client in Washington DC. Our client would start work at 6am or 7am and demanded a weekly 7am meeting with our team.

    Obviously, I was not make a lot of money and in a high cost of living city, so I lived in a house that had several bus lines but no metro. The buses started at 6:30am but the first few weren’t reliable. If everything *magically* aligned, I could make it to the meeting exactly at 7am but that was unlikely. I explained that to the team lead and he said to take it to the CEO. The CEO told me he didn’t see the issue. So after a few weeks of standing outside at the bus stop in the cold winter at 6:30am (several times only to have the bus drive right by me because it was dark and the driver wasn’t expecting anyone), I was late. The CEO finally agreed I could take a cab, but only to the metro which started at 5am.

    For reference, the cab to the metro would be $10 and the cab to the meeting would only be $15-20. My coworker came in and told me “FYI, the CEO doesn’t live in DC and doesn’t know the price of a cab. Just tell him a higher price and take the cab the whole way to the meeting”. I did that instead.

    A few weeks later, they tried to move me (the only young woman engineer) to the front desk in the reception area while everyone else had an office. I told the CEO this would make the company look bad. I could be presenting my engineering work and customers wouldn’t listen since it would appear to be just be the receptionist presenting. The CEO said “well I would think that they would listen to what you’re saying and be able to tell you’re an engineer”.
    HR (the CEO’s daughter) called later and said “okay, we’ll do a rotation and you’ll just be the first one at the front desk”. I told her no, I would not be the first one because I would clearly be stuck there and that if it was truly a rotation, someone else should start.
    I’m not proud of this, but I had a pretty emotional day after those conversations. I think my office mate just left for about an hour while I was crying.
    Another male coworker was leaving after having a terrible experience working there and agreed to sit at the front desk during his notice period and let me take his desk.

    I got laid off a few weeks later for sequestration and ended up getting another job before I spent all the severance. When I called my sister to tell her I was laid off she goes “From the horrible job you were desperate to leave? And they gave you money to not come back? Why are you crying? That’s awesome!”

  459. Late to the Party*

    I worked for a corporate venue/catering company that was located halfway between the office and my house. This will be important later. The owner’s mother was a renowned chef.

    The owner never had enough money in the bank to cover the bills. This was back before online banking so I had to call the bank each morning and find out how much we needed to deposit that day to get us back in the black. It also took a call to his mother to go to the bank and make said deposit from her personal bank account.

    When I opened the mail each day, I had to prioritize who would get paid and who could wait. One month I missed the electric bill for the venue and the electricity was cut off during a luncheon event. My punishment was to go to the electric company and pay the bill in person. Except his mother’s deposit had not cleared the bank so the company check was no good. Somehow I managed to cry enough that someone at the electric company felt sorry for me and issued the order to restore the electricity. As I am driving back to the office, I see him coming out of his attorney’s office and stop to tell him that it had all been resolved. I never got the chance to speak as all he could do was yell at me.

    Here comes the revenge part. The business was audited by the state department of labor shortly after the electric bill incident. The auditor interviewed me and I casually mentioned that once or twice a week, the owner or his mother called wanting me to pick something up at the store and deliver it to the venue on the way home. I had made notes on my calendar of the days I had done that. They didn’t think they had to pay me extra since I was on my way home. It was a nice chunk of overtime pay he was ordered to pay me, in addition to all of the I-9 forms that were missing. I left shortly thereafter.

  460. Human Embodiment of the 100 Emoji*

    Ah, time for me to tell the potential homicide case gun story…

    I’m going to be as vague as possible, for obvious reasons. Essentially, I worked for a museum-like institution. My boss forwarded me an email from a law enforcement officer asking if we can accession (permanently acquire) a gun into out collection. Weird request, but it could have been related to our mission, so I schedule a call with her to gather more information. Here’s basically how that conversation went:

    “Can you tell me more about the gun?”

    “Some locals found it in a park with a human skeleton a few days ago and turned it in to us!”

    “UHHHHHHH…..”

    The worst part was that after I explained this all to my boss, he still seemed to think it would be totally reasonable for us to take the gun. It was a fun work environment…..

  461. artsyfartsywoman*

    I was asked to leave an Oscar party with friends in LA, drive basically right by the actual Oscars to my boss’s house because there was a dead owl in his driveway. He was in NYC and wanted me to file a police report because he thought his ex-girlfriend left it there as a threat (he also gets bonus points for racism because he somehow thought this because she was Mexican?). I went to the police station and they basically laughed me out of there (of course they did!). The next day he wanted me to save the dead owl for a potential necropsy, but thankfully someone had properly disposed of it at that point so I didn’t have to do that. I probably would have done it because at the time I was young and naïve and didn’t realize how toxic and lacking in boundaries this boss was.

  462. Kayem*

    This isn’t the most unreasonable, but it was the first unreasonable thing I was asked to do and should have been a red flag for the year and a half to come.

    I previously worked for a property management company as an administrative assistant. I got promoted to property manager at another facility to replace the manager who left under mysterious circumstances. Unlike the facility I came from, this one had no budget and was plagued with things like the company not paying their bills. I was told when I started that there would be a petty cash fund in the office for supplies, but I had to send the contents of the petty cash drawer to the company’s head office because they were making the switch to debit/cash cards. The previous way of doing petty cash was to collect money from the laundry vending machines weekly, mail it to the head office along with our document drops each Monday morning, and receive a check of that amount to cash. It was awkward and time consuming.

    The new way was to mail the laundry money every Monday and that amount would be loaded onto the card. It was still awkward and time consuming (plus expensive since I had to overnight a box of quarters each week) . So I mailed the balance of petty cash in as instructed and mailed a box of quarters each Monday. The petty cash card never came. I made weekly inquiries for the first couple months, but was routinely ignored. The office had practically zero office supplies and I wasn’t allowed to buy supplies out of pocket and submit receipts later. Everything had to be done on paper for regulatory reasons and the lack of copy paper was impacting my ability to do my job.

    Finally a debit card arrived, but there were no funds on it. When I asked about it, my higher ups told me funds wouldn’t be available until I mailed back the petty cash and laundry quarters. I went back and forth for a while, arguing that I had sent it, had the mailing receipts with tracking numbers showing the packages were delivered, and emails from them stating the cash had been received. They kept responding by saying they couldn’t add funds until I mailed them back the cash. It was like talking to a confused tech support chat bot.

    Finally, they agreed to add funds and said they would just wipe the slate clean and sent me a document to sign. I was perplexed because the document stated (among other things) that I was affirming there was no cash in the office when I took over and no money in the laundry machines. This was my first real professional office job, so I’m really glad I first ran it by my husband (who had many years experience in the professional world) before obediently signing. He said that I should under no circumstances sign a document that stated a falsehood about financing, especially when there was a paper trail that stated otherwise. So I refused to sign, stating again that I had documentation showing all this. The higher ups were Not Happy with this. Really, really, really unhappy and they kept pressuring me to sign, but I refused unless it was changed to reflect that I had sent in the cash. They refused to change it. I thought it was really weird that they were so adamant about this, but eventually they stopped asking. They also never funded the card, so I wound up buying supplies out of pocket and submitting for reimbursement, which was a nightmare to deal with.

    Fast forward a year and a half. My direct supervisor and I uncovered a paper trail that showed one half of the company’s executives were committing insurance fraud, tax fraud, and scamming a federal low income program. My supervisor informed the other half and then he disappeared for two months. The company president showed up at the facility trying to find out what happened to my supervisor, which set off a whole chain of events that led to myself and all my employees getting fired and replaced with new handpicked staff.

    I later discovered that the corrupt half of the company used property managers as scapegoats/patsies in the event they ever got caught. They’d create a fake paper trail showing the property manager had embezzled funds, submit it to their insurance, then get paid for the losses (along with other side hustles they had going on). They had a few “interim property managers” they would install in between each manager they set up that magically found the evidence. They even went further and hired a new company president right as he got out of federal prison for committing bank fraud so they could pin whatever they needed on him.

    The company assumed that with my background of parks & rec and retail that I would be an easy target. All they had to do was get me to sign that document and bam! They’d have clear proof that I was stealing all along. They were wrong. My previous parks & rec job was working at the US Dept of Interior and the one thing I learned working for the federal government is to document everything. I kept copies of everything and as soon as my supervisor uncovered the fraud, I even sent my entire email archive to a backup just in case.

    The mysterious disappearance of my predecessor was because she panicked went on the run after being accused of embezzlement (fortunately, she documented enough and was later exonerated). Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of my supervisor and I, the company execs who started this whole thing got off with a nice pension. Even the state, which always lauded how dedicated they were at taking down fraud, turned a blind eye to it because this company was also a major player in the state receiving certain grant money. My employees got better jobs, my supervisor is enjoying his retirement, and while I haven’t been able to get a regular full time job since, at least I’m no longer working 70 hour weeks and crying myself to sleep.

    —————

    Other things the company made me do or tried to make me do (not a full list):

    Evict an elderly disabled man because the HUD office called and said his check was going to be a week late (I did not do that).
    Refuse to take rent money from tenants paying on time so they could be charged late fees (haha no).
    Agree to say I didn’t do any paperwork so they could avoid responsibility for forgetting to submit the state audit paperwork (nope nope nope)
    Sleep in the office during weekdays so I could answer the phone if the higher ups called (I didn’t do it and no one complained).
    Work for a week without electricity in the office because they refused to pay the past due electric bill.
    Work for a month without phone and internet access because they refused to pay the past due bills.
    Work without water in the office and community center for three months because they refused to pay past due bills.
    Require me to haul trash from the dumpsters to the dump because they refused to pay the past due solid waste bills (They relented when I gave them a calculation of how long I’d be away from the office while hauling 50+ apartments’ worth of garbage in a Honda Civic, but they still wouldn’t pay the bills).
    Live without utilities in our on-site apartment because they wouldn’t pay the bills (we put our apartment utilities in our name because it was better than never knowing if we’d have electricity).
    Call contractors from other states to come work on repairs and maintenance because they never paid invoices and had burned all bridges in town and all the nearby towns.
    Take fixtures and appliances from my onsite apartment to put in empty units so we could rent them out (They got the closet doors, but nothing else).
    Require all my emergency contact numbers to be on call in my place (because my parents want to drive 12 hours to fix a toilet for a place they don’t work at?).
    Make my spouse sign an NDA preventing him from talking about anything he sees while we lived there.

  463. SammyHolt*

    I was working as a production assistant in Los Angles on a music video for a well known rapper. I was being paid a very low flat rate for a 12 hour plus day but hey it’s “the biz” so you do it. My duties for the day included “assisting the art dept” by splashing fake blood and guts on the walls then staying late to clean it off, buying condoms at the store (to be used as props), and otherwise running myself ragged with random requests. All the while we were told not to sit down as it was “unprofessional”. One part of the day I liked tho. They brought actual wolves in to be featured in the video and I was stationed outside the door to tell people not to go in because the wolves are hanging out in there before their scene. That last request was not unreasonable hah.

    1. GoryDetails*

      OK, this sounds like one of the most interesting gigs in the thread. “Beware-Of-Wolf Warning Person” would be a great addition to a resume! (As would “blood and guts distributor,” especially if you wanted to move on to a job with the “Walking Dead” franchise…)

  464. Oranges and Lemons*

    This is more of a be careful what you prioritize with students story…Way back in the day, I worked for a data entry company that input medical bills. It was a part-time job during my undergrad years and it was deadly boring, but paid better than other hourly options. Our job was to enter in the numeric codes for the symptoms that doctors had hand-written on procedures for insurance companies to bill. Doing a good job meant being fast (over 50 per hour) and not getting complaints from patients about why Medicare didn’t cover their bill. We were told which symptoms didn’t get covered (like “fatigue”) and those that did (“dizziness, nausea”), so if there were multiple symptoms on the form, we would enter in one that fell into the covered bucket.

    The problem: doctors really do have terrible handwriting. So if we couldn’t figure it out, we had to enter in our best guess that was also covered by Medicare. I only remember doing this a few times and picking something that seemed pretty universal that matched best to what I thought the doctor wrote (like “headache”). But my friend decided it would be faster if he just used “heart attack” any time he wasn’t sure what the doctor meant, since it was clearly covered by Medicare. Fast forward a few months and we had a poor patient call in completely upset because his doctor never told him that he had a heart attack. They couldn’t trace back who did what forms so they never found out how it happened. I’m really surprised that they didn’t get in more trouble though…there was no oversight on what we were entering.

  465. Volunteer*

    Mine is actually something I wasn’t allowed to do but should have been.
    I volunteered at a food pantry that had different lines for all the different types of food (bread, meat, produce, etc.).
    One couple had gotten a package of hot dogs and came to the bread line and wanted hot dog buns, but the supervisor wouldn’t let me give them out because they were way in the back (there was other bread that he wanted to give away first). I understand wanting to save time, but the people could even see the buns, and I think the nice thing to do would’ve been to give them out.

  466. IrishMN*

    When I was in college, my first office job was as an “office assistant” to a small company. The thing is, the owner really wanted a *personal* assistant. The office manager already did a ton of stuff for her that would normally not be the job of an office manager, including doing her personal shopping (groceries etc.) and paying her personal bills, signing the boss’s signature on checks.

    In addition to stuffing envelopes, a big part of my job ended up being things like returning stuff to stores (including, at one point, ONE sock with no receipt because they “felt funny” on her feet – when I got that request I went to the office manager and she took the sock and said, “if Boss asks about it, just tell her to talk to me”). I also frequently was sent out to get ridiculously complex coffee orders, get the boss’s car washed, etc. (Luxury car that I was terrified to drive.)

    This boss was the kind of person who really wanted to give off an air of being richer than she was. This included doing some shady stuff like using her cabin in another state as her residence so that she could get cheaper car tabs. She also had a housekeeper that she paid under the table.

    So one time she fills out a withdrawal slip and tells me to go to the bank and take out cash to pay the housekeeper. I said, don’t you have to show ID to do that? She said no, the signed slip should be fine, and if they asked, just pretend I was her. I was super uncomfortable with this, but I went down to the bank.

    Turns out she’d filled out the slip improperly. The woman at the bank said that I needed to fill out a new slip, which would require a signature. I was not about to forge my boss’s signature to get cash out of her account. I got flustered and told the teller that I would need to check on something and quickly left. I’m sure she thought I was doing something shady.

    Another thing that really ticked me off at that job was related to the boss’s son. They were estranged and suddenly he showed back up in her life. I guess he had a serious drug problem, and to quote Boss, “yesterday I didn’t know if he was dead in the gutter and now here he is.” Nonetheless she decided to employ him at the company. Guy literally could not properly stuff an envelope. The worst part though was that sometimes I would be left alone in the office with him, when other people would leave early (3 or 4) and I had to stay through 5. Who knew what kind of stuff this guy might be up to or people he was associated with?

    So glad I didn’t stay there long. Boss was a nut and couldn’t seem to manage anything in her life. I looked her up awhile back and she appears to have a fairly high-up job in healthcare management, which I find somewhat terrifying.

  467. Libretta*

    I was a lab tech whose job description included things like doing experiments with cells and chemical reagents, but my postdoc supervisor believed I was his personal assistant. As he was walking out the door for a 2-week trip, he told me he had left the key to his car in his desk. He had loaned the car to some friends, but wanted me to be on-call in case they got locked out or had car trouble. He had given them my personal cell phone number, and if they called I was to fetch the key from his desk and bring it to them, wherever in the city they might be, or assist them with auto maintenance.

    I told him I would not do that, and if they called me, I would tell them they were out of luck. While he was gone I spoke to his boss and HR and asked to have a different supervisor – request granted. There were other instances where he asked me to do things that were blatantly unsafe and/or against the rules. He did accept ‘no’ for an answer, but was forever perplexed that I did not simply obey his every command.

  468. Cupcake*

    I took a temp paralegal/assistant role for an attorney that was a major piece of work. He advertised at for the role at my school as an internship. After starting I learned he wanted to 1099 me even though the position was very much not a 1099 role. He asked me to do lots of meaningless tasks, like cleaning out the awful microwave and finding a vacuum from a neighboring office. The problem was he presented the job to me and my paralegal school as a real legal internship. He never had me prepare or proofread any pleadings or any other paralegal work. After I was there about 2 weeks or so I learned the truth: the regular receptionist was out on maternity leave, having the attorney’s baby. He called temping for his firm an internship so he could pay minimum wage via 1099. Btw, the receptionist was 25 years younger than the attorney and heartbroken he wouldn’t marry her. And the dumb part is he could have been honest with the school about the role being a temp receptionist position and they would have filled it. I had classmate that were out of work that would have appreciated the work as is. I took the role expecting real paralegal experience, because I already had a job working nights at a grocery store. I quit in week 3 when he was angry when I pointed out a typo in a bill. I am sure he was double billing and didn’t want me to notice.

  469. wine dude*

    A very long time ago in college I manned the office at a location of a well known DIY moving company. At the end of a day the guy in charge of the crew that would do the hitching of trailers and cleaning of trucks came in and asked me to lend him a “Benjamin” from the till. I said “What?” and he said “Just a few minutes, I’ll be right here.” Okaaaay. He then proceeds to pickup one of the rental mirrors (for towing), wipe it off, and cut out lines of cocaine on it – and then rolled up ol’ Ben to snort it.
    Yes I got Used Ben back (ugh) and no he didn’t offer to share.

  470. NotAnotherManager!*

    Just last week, a first-year associate insisted our mailroom find a USPS drop that would take her package at 10 PM. The latest drop in our area is 7:30 PM. He did not understand why the mailroom supervisor couldn’t make this happen for him and complained about the “poor service” to anyone who would listen. Someone finally pointed out that pretty much no one could change USPS deadlines. (Then, the mailroom supervisor complained about him because he was quite rude about it.)

  471. Baska*

    I once worked at a teeny-tiny (2-person) nonprofit. My new boss, who’d just been hired after the old one retired, told me not to inform the Board that he was taking a 3-week trip to Israel to deal with his sister’s health issues. When I asked him what to do if a Board member called and wanted to speak with him, he said to just take the message and send it to him.

    I tried. I legit tried. But he wound up responding to emails at really weird times (given that we’re in Canada and he was in Israel) and was completely unavailable by phone. One of the Board members asked me, “Hey, is NewBoss out of the country?” And I decided that while I was willing to obfuscate to an extent, I wasn’t willing to outright lie to a direct question, so I told the Board member what was up.

    Unsurprisingly, that was not the only sketchy thing going on with that particular boss. I think he lasted maybe six months before the Board fired him.

  472. Gul DuCat*

    I was asked to do weeding/yardwork on campus, along with everyone in any position. I’m a librarian.

  473. Alison Nelson*

    I was a waitress one summer of college for a struggling restaurant. Before one shift they called me and asked me to stop at the store to get a bottle of ketchup. Needless to say, the restaurant closed shortly thereafter.

    1. Artemesia*

      My first real job was with a greasy spoon where we would sometimes run out of coffee cups on weekend mornings when we got a lot of post church late breakfast eaters. We had menu items like coleslaw and potato salad that people rarely ordered; often when they did, I would have to run out the back door and up to the small grocery store and buy a carton and rush back with it.

  474. Adams*

    I was managing and roasting for a small coffee shop. They required me to sleep there in the event of snow storms. I lived over an hour away. There was no heat in the building (the roaster supplied the heat), broken windows upstairs, and no shower. The owners expected me to keep a change of clothes, toiletries, and a sleeping bag in my car I left before the first snow storms hit.

  475. A Good Egg*

    My boss called me, “Nate’s in jail, can you go bail him out?” Nate had talked back to a cop during a traffic stop, and the cop arrested him. I’d already been planning to meet him the next day, and my flight was leaving in 2 hours. The unreasonable part of the demand came when I called the jail where Nate was hanging out, and I was told it would take $1,000 cash to get him out of there. I found my money belt from a previous trip to Europe and strapped it on. I went to the bank, got the cash, and got on my flight. By the time I landed, Nate had paid his fine (~$250) and met me at the hotel. The rest of the trip went fine, and I deposited the money back at the bank when I got home. I was always disappointed that I couldn’t fill out the miscellaneous form on my expense report with “Bail, $1,000.”

    1. James*

      I know at least one employee of a contractor we were working with ended up getting bailed out by his boss. He was late for work, and when his boss called him he was in jail. Turns out he had several hundred dollars in unpaid parking tickets. He had gone in that morning to get his badge, and the parking tickets came up in the routine background check (which he knew about, he’d gone through it before). The guards said there’d be a delay, please just wait in the lobby, and called the sheriff.

  476. Amethystmoon*

    Before the days where cars were being manufactured with phones in them, back when all you had was a cell phone, I was chastised for not picking up the phone while I was driving somewhere, and waiting until I could find a place to safely stop (I had been on the freeway). Hard work is one thing, but I didn’t volunteer to put my personal safety on the line for a desk job. Granted, there are jobs where you are expected to risk your life, but desk jobs generally aren’t one of them. My state finally does have a driving law where you can’t be seen on a cellphone and driving. It took them long enough to get there.

    1. MarsJenkar*

      I would be leery of answering a call while driving, even with a hands-free phone system. They’re more distracting than people realize. At minimum I’d pull to the shoulder to take the call; if I knew it was going to be a long talk, I’d wait until I had a place to safely park.

      Even by today’s standards, the person who wanted you to pick up was unreasonable.

  477. Run mad; don't faint*

    Held a weekly meeting with my boss out in the woods near our office because he was expecting to be served with papers concerning his role in a divorce case and was trying to avoid being served. When I think about it, avoidance was pretty much the way he handled everything…

  478. I’m not the front desk person*

    Client came to meet with my boss. Parked his car in a 1 hour only metered spot. The meeting took nearly all day. I had to go outside, cross the street, and refill the meter like 5 or 6 times.

  479. KayDeeAye*

    Years ago, the nonprofit I work for hosted this “town hall meeting” on a controversial issue in the far southwest corner of the state – about as far away from the part of Indiana we are headquartered in as you can get without crossing the Kentucky state line. I was doing media relations at the time, and (at the time) that required full business wear, so I wore an actual suit. But I knew I’d be walking a LOT, so I wore a suit for which I had a comfortable pair of low-healed shoes to match.

    I carpooled with several coworkers to go to this distant location, and we got to the site of the event, which was a high school gymnasium. And it was as I was walking around this gym getting ready for the meeting that I discovered that my perfectly ordinary shoes made, for some reason, a loud clicking noise on this floor. I wore those shoes many times before and after this occasion and never had an issue, but at this time and in this place, yeah, they were pretty noisy.

    But what could I do? I was 100+ miles away from my other pairs of shoes, so I couldn’t switch to something else. And there was a lot of media there that needed help, plus I was shooting photos, so there was no way to avoid walking around. So I resigned myself to being The Clicking Shoes Person for the duration of the meeting. Which is what I was.

    After the meeting, this irate old gentleman came up to me specifically to tell me how much he hated my shoes. “They were so noisy!” he said. “I know,” I said, “I’m so sorry!” “They were soooooo noisy!” he said. “I’m sorry,” I said. “They were so distracting!” he said. “I know. I’m so sorry,” I said. And that’s how it went for a good 2-3 minutes: “Noisy!” “Sorry!” “Distracting!” “Sorry!” “Noisy and distracting!” “Sorry!” etc., etc., etc.

    Finally, I said, “Sir, I know my shoes were noisy, and I am truly sorry about that. They’ve never been noisy before, and I can’t explain why they were tonight, but I really do apologize for annoying you. However, I’ve now apologized at least nine times, and that doesn’t seem to be helping. Is there anything I can do or say to reduce your annoyance?”

    He fumed for a few seconds, and then he said, “You could have walked around in your stockinged feet. Lots of people walk around in their stockinged feet!” And then he turned on his heel and stormed away, still fuming. This was years ago and he was quite elderly, but if he’s still alive, I bet he’s still mad and still talks about the woman with the noisy and distracting shoes. But I’ll also bet he doesn’t walk around in public places in his stockinged feet !

    1. CommanderBanana*

      I want to both stomp around this guy while wearing clicking shoes AND kick him with my stockinged feet.

      1. KayDeeAye*

        I know, right? I genuinely felt bad at first, but after the 3rd or 4th “Annoying!” “Sorry!” exchange, I started to wish I’d worn tap shoes, except that would have annoyed other people in addition to Fuming Man, which would have been a shame.

        Here is an optional secondary anecdote: Around the midway point of all those “Annoying!” “Sorry!” exchanges, Fuming Man said, accusingly, “Why would you wear shoes like that?” I can’t remember what I actually said – some would-be calming words, I’m sure – but what I thought was “Well, they match my outfit.” And then the “Annoying!” “Sorry!” exchanges resumed, until Fuming Man walked off, fuming.

        So then (I swear this is true) another elderly gentleman whom I knew slightly by sight came up to chat, and after a few pleasantries, he said, “By the way, you look very nice this evening.” “Thanks,” I said. “Funny you should mention that because the man who was talking to me right before you was complaining about my shoes and how noisy they are on this floor.”

        And elderly gentleman #2 said (again, this is absolutely true), “But they match your outfit.”

  480. Kayem*

    Here’s one about a former coworker.

    Jane and I worked at a large retail store in the garden department. She’s was getting married soon and really excited. They had planned a huge wedding in Salt Lake City near the Mormon temple with family and would have their honeymoon there. She already had the two weeks of (unpaid) time off approved. A few weeks before the wedding, the manager for our half of the store later revoked that, saying he couldn’t let her take two weeks off, but approved one week. So Jane cut her honeymoon short. A week later, the manager says he can’t let her take a week off, but she can have three days. She needed the job to pay for the wedding, but she also didn’t want to look flighty if she quit after working there for only six months, so she relented and said fine, she’d get married locally and skip the honeymoon until later.

    A week before the wedding, the manager says he can’t give her three days, but he can give her half a day off so she can have her wedding and then come into work after. Jane’s like are you freaking kidding me, no way! The manager got huffy and stormed off. He came back 20 minutes later, beaming as if he was her best friend and told her that he had a great idea: she could get married in the store! And the store manager could conduct it since he has ULC ordination! And she wouldn’t have to clock out because it can happen at the team meeting!

    I have never seen someone quit so fast. It was glorious to behold and the only time I ever heard her utter an actual curse word.

    Jane’s parents had fortunately never cancelled the reservations in SLC, so they were able to have their original honeymoon as planned. She also found a better job that paid more.

    1. KayDeeAye*

      That’s just…I mean…How could he…What? What? WHAT?

      Great story, and I’m glad to hear it worked out for poor Jane!

    3. calonkat*

      I assume this is the manager who wouldn’t give the employee time off for graduation. Hopefully there aren’t mroe than one of them running around!!!

      1. Kayem*

        I am 99.9% sure that manager prevented people from going to graduation. I had gone back to school at the time and took the job only because they swore they’d work with my class schedule. I wound up having to drop out because I was always put on a schedule that directly conflicted with classes. I had no issue working weekends and we were desperate for weekend coverage, but I always wound up on the schedule for weekdays exactly when I needed to be in class.

        That manager was eventually fired, though. The store manager discovered he had been waiting until the day after a time off request had passed and then denying time off for “not submitting time off requests in a timely manner.” This came to light because an employee had to go to her mother’s funeral and submitted for three days off, but the days were never approved (her mother was in hospice on life support and they had made plans when to turn support off, so it was a really rough time for her).

        She told her direct supervisor about still waiting for approval the night before the funeral and the supervisor told her to just take the next three days off and he would handle the paperwork when she got back. When she and her supervisor asked why she wasn’t approved for time off when she had submitted it in a timely manner, the store manager went to see the other manager and walked in on him deleting the past three months’ worth of his denials of time off requests.

        This was the same guy who denied me the standard annual 25 cent pay raise because I had requested too many days off that year. Not taken too many days off, just requested them. Which was a total of ten days spread out over the year, none of which I received.

        And all of this time off for me, the coworker getting married, and the coworker whose mom died? All unpaid. We didn’t get PTO at our level, which made that manager’s crap even more awful. He even told us all if we were really serious about our jobs, we wouldn’t ever ask for time off because we already get the equivalent of five working days off every week for the hours we aren’t on the clock.

  481. CatLadyLawyer*

    I work for a F500 company and industry leader in North America – primarily an American company, with a distinctly American name. I got transferred to the Canadian headquarters after my predecessor was fired for a dramatically major fuck up. In the 2nd week of working there, while I’m still introducing myself to outside vendors the legal department uses regularly, the SVP of operations came into my office to say someone had overheard me tell a vendor I’m an American, and “instructing” me not to do that again because in Canada we are “Canada first.”

    A) I only mentioned my nationality to the extent it was relevant to my educational background and experience -like yes I need some help learning the Canadian differences in the industry but I don’t want people to think I’m stupid.
    B) people would just ASK and am I just supposed to lie? It’s all on linked in!
    C) what the fuck lol everyone knows we are an American company, it’s in the fucking name.
    D) SVP of operations was not my boss (I reported directly to the legal team in the US) and had zero authority over me.
    E) why are people eavesdropping on my calls?

    I reported this to my actual SVP and never heard a word about it again.

  482. Hacker For Hire*

    Not my manager, but my senior coworker (we were both network admins at the time) asked me to give a good look into a fiber optic port to see if the network connection was up.

    Fiber optic connections use lasers, which can severely damage your retina. For this purpose, there are fiber optic laser testers. But we did not have one, so he looked straight into a port, got a good laser beam into his eye, and said “ow — connection is up”. He then expected me to do the same on another port.

    Obviously I said no.

  483. lalalindz*

    Over 12 years ago, I worked at a small printing company, mostly doing admin work. I was in my early 20s. My manager was very lovely but not always the best at being an effective leader. Like she had to tell a colleague that she needs to shower me, and told me all about it – not really appropriate to tell a subordinate.

    One day, she told me that her period is very heavy (I’m also a woman) and she’s seeing a doctor about it. Okay cool, no biggie.

    But then another day, while she had her period, she pulled me aside and told me how (TMI info coming), she just stood up and felt a “gush,” and wanted me to look at her butt to see if she had leaked at all. Then that she was going to the bathroom to check, and wanted me to run to the department store across the street to buy her new underwear! In the end, she didn’t leak onto her pants at all (or require new underwear), but I was dumbstruck when she asked. That’s definitely the most out-there request I’ve had at work!

    2. This might explain my boundary issues*

      That happened to me, too, complete with the word “gush.” Except it was a peer, and she had leaked, but I wasn’t asked to get any underwear. She tied a sweater around her waist and we both tried to forget it happened. I’m not sure why either of these individuals didn’t take a trip to the ladies’ room as their first step…

  484. Big Bird*

    I was explicitly ordered not to report a serious HR compliance issue on the ground that we had already reported too many compliance issues and that we were beginning to look bad. We are an internationally-known institution and it was important to fix the issue before an employee found it first. Unfortunately, I had already discussed it with our outside counsel in order to confirm that it was as serious as I thought it was. (Yes, it was.) I was threatened with termination, and I actually took my pictures off my office walls and told my direct reports that we had to make contingency plans. I was never fired, and I have to assume that outside counsel read someone the riot act. That was five years ago–I was passed over for promotion and the first person who got the job lasted three months. The second person lasted 15 months. The person who almost fired me “retired” but I know I will never get a promotion but I would do it again in a heartbeat

  485. Alexis Rosay*

    Not me, but a coworker–we were working at a fundraiser and my coworker was asked to take care of a board member who was already drunk and vomiting in a garbage can less than 1.5 hrs into the event. The next day, another board member (who did not attend) scolded the staff for ‘allowing’ that board member to drink (there was an open bar and drinks were served by a catering company).

  486. Wolfie*

    Many years ago, I lived in Ventura and worked in Thousand Oaks. My manager also lived in Ventura. There was a wildfire while he was on a business trip in New York (this was when wildfires were still relatively rare in California). He heard that they were evacuating people from his apartment complex for safety, and he asked me if I would go to his apartment and get some files out of his garage that he didn’t want possibly to be destroyed in the fire. I don’t know how he thought I’d do this in the first place because I didn’t have a key. I told him no, with incredulity in my voice. The area was unsafe and they were evacuating people! Certainly I wasn’t going to put myself in harm’s way for his dumb files. That manager wasn’t malicious or anything… I think he was just really dumb about some things!

  487. Debra J Mitchell*

    I worked for a Very Important Attorney who had a good friend/mentor who lived in Germany. I got to work one morning to find a voice mail from VIA who said Friend had died and he wanted to send flowers. I was not to just call 1-800-Flowers or anything like that; I was to contact a local florist (in Germany) and order the flowers from them. And it was already noon in Germany, so I’d better get on it. I do not speak German at all; this was in the early days of the Internet when you didn’t just type in [City] and “florist”. I finally got the idea to call the Chamber of Commerce in Friend’s town, using the international directory assistance operator and thankfully, got someone who spoke English. They gave me the number of a local florist. The florist allowed as how she spoke “some” English and what ensued is one of the most bizarre conversations of my life. VIA had specified that the flowers were to be placed on an easel. German Florist did not know “easel” and I eventually had to use the Eiffel Tower as an example of the shape of the desired support. After much frustration, we got to the payment portion of the program and I gave her VIA’s Amex number. It would not go through. I finally gave her my personal credit card number and it was accepted. Someone who attended the funeral reported to VIA that the flowers were lovely (!) and he gave me a check for the charges when my credit card bill came in.

  488. IrishMN*

    Another job I had in college was as a cashier for a well known orange home improvement store. They had an outside garden area with a couple registers, and they usually had two people working out there together.

    One night we got a call that another store a few miles away had been robbed – the robber had jimmied open the outside register when no one was around and stole the cash.

    This was around fall and the garden center wasn’t very busy. You could go an hour or more without seeing a customer (I think many customers didn’t even realized there were checkouts out there). Nonetheless, that evening my store decided they wanted a cashier stationed in the garden center.

    Now, there were people who worked in that department, but it just one or two, and they would go inside and out and weren’t necessarily anywhere near the registers, which were right next to the parking lot.

    I was assigned to be the lone cashier in the garden center. I said, what about the call we got about the robbery? I was told by a (young, male) manager to “keep an eye out for anyone that looks suspicious.”

    I was a young woman and I was not about to stand around out there by myself, as it was getting dark, next to a cash register full of money, with no one around…and when we had been *warned about the robbery that had happened only hours earlier in the exact same scenario*!

    I refused and was treated like I was being paranoid.

  489. Lemon It's Wednesday*

    I worked at a summer camp at a zoo and we were cleaning out all the supplies. My main boss was a bit of a pack rat and we had a lot of old craft supplies we didn’t really need/ weren’t usable. There were a couple of those cheap paint your own mug kits lying in the pile, and my other boss told me to throw them out.
    A while later my main boss came back and asked where they were. The two bosses then got in a huge fight and it ended with me having to go crawl in the dumpster to get the two mug kits out. This was no ordinary dumpster. This was the primate keepers’ dumpster, and it was disgusting.

    Those two mugs were still in the hoard pile years later when I left.

  490. Tessa Ryan*

    I work for a nonprofit, and a couple years ago I offered to water the flowers around the building during the summer. It’s a pretty big building with several gates, so there are two hoses on either side of the building. After finishing the first side, I went over to the second hose, turned it on, and was sprayed with water from head to toe. I think someone must have driven over the hose with their car, since that hose was right next to the driveway.

    When I went in to tell my boss I couldn’t finish watering the flower, there was a trail of water dripping on the floor. My boss starts panicking, asking me if I finished watering the plants. When I explained the hose was broken…. she went to her office, poured out all the trash from her tiny bathroom-sized trash can into the middle of the floor, handed it to me, and told me to finish watering the flowers. I honestly thought my coworker who watched the entire exchanged was going to pass out from trying not to laugh. I don’t water the flowers anymore.

  491. fogharty*

    Short version: Procure an inflatable sex doll and a frozen ice cream cake.
    Long version…. very long. Very long indeed.

  492. mimi*

    I had a boss (late 30sM) who formally polled the staff– entirely women under 25– which gendered slur (think “b” and “c”) we’d rather be called. We all answered it (unanimously)! Then he argued with us because it turns out he’d gotten into an argument with his ex-partner and called her the *other* one, and he’d wanted us to validated his opinion that it wasn’t the worst thing he could have called her.

  493. ggg*

    I was a temp. My job was to file things and answer the phone.
    First day, first call, the person asked to be transferred to my boss and I obliged.
    My boss screamed into the phone for thirty minutes, then yelled at me for thirty minutes. I had not been trained to ask every caller if they were the lying, cheating scumbag whom she was divorcing.
    She transferred me to a basement office where I spent the rest of my temp arrangement scanning news clippings about the company and watching soap operas. This was fine.

  494. Ann Gillard*

    At a telemarketing job that branded itself as fundraising for progressive causes and had a Jewish organization as a client, I was told to change my not-Jewish-sounding last name to “Goldstein” when I cold-called people to ask for money.

  495. Rex's Mom*

    Some background: I changed careers in my early 30s and went into a profession where you have to “apprentice” for someone for a few years to secure a professional license. As a result of this, those who train you know they have your @ss over a barrel. Pay very little, offer no benefits and can use you to do stupid, meaningless work while you do your time. There were a lot of odd requests over those years, but this one sticks out because it wasn’t really a request.

    About two months after I started we were having a company lunch for the holidays. There were about ten of us and I wore khakis, a sweater and jewelry. From my perspective, I wasn’t dressed any differently than anyone else (certainly wasn’t dressed down). When one of the partners stepped into my office and recoiled. I looked around because I didn’t know what she was making such a face about. She said “Come with me.” She drove me to her house and made me change into her pants and shoes. I don’t know why it was so important for me to wear black pants rather than khakis. Thank god she didn’t have a problem with the panties I was wearing. . .

    After that I knew it was going to be a long four years.

  496. I'm Not Going Back To Tax Work*

    I had a seasonal job as a receptionist at a tax office (one of the big chains: I won’t say which one but you can probably guess) and one of the job duties was campaign calls. Basically cold calling old clients who hadn’t hade appointments to see if we can get them on the schedule.

    We were explicitly told to call them no matter what the call logs said. If we left a voicemail and got no response? Call again the next day. Still no response? Call again. We go by what the computer says. Not by what the tax advisor who actually works with these people say. I frequently got cursed out because we would be calling people who hadn’t used that office in years. And the tax advisors would get in trouble if they told us which clients we didn’t need to call. Some of these people had died! Some moved out of state. Some had changed numbers. But manager insisted we go by the computer system.

    But the function to take people out of the system was conveniently broken. And the campaigns would renew every few weeks so we’d end up having to call unresponsive clients 9 times. That place was also chronically understaffed so I frequently ended up working alone when I should have had a partner. It was hell and I’m never going back.

  497. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

    I have two!

    1) Posted about this recently – Back in Home Country, I was an admin assistant at a small private school, mainly in charge of the office computer (since owner/director knew that I had a CS degree). The keyboard broke, and my boss sent me to a small computer repair shop next door to get it fixed, but said to “try and negotiate the price down. Talk to them, act nice. You’re a woman, you know what to do” hahaha no, dude, why don’t you send your wife to the shop next time with those instructions.

    2) Not at work, but a happy hour – a number of us decided to drive to a bar in a fancy outdoor shopping center 20ish miles away for an afterparty. I drove and a middle manager from another department, and an HR rep, rode with me. The manager guy kept complaining about my driving and sighing loudly, I thought he was feeling carsick, but nope! In the middle of us walking from the shopping-center parking lot to the bar, he suddenly said “I can’t hold it anymore, not going to make it to the bar, can you two stand guard” steps into the doorway of a bank that we were walking past, unzips his pants, and starts peeing on a wall. We did stand guard. I spotted a group of nice old ladies walking in our direction from their night out, and ran towards them to intercept. My bright idea was to ask them what time it was, and to then pretend to not be able to hear well, and ask again and again. They probably thought I was out of my mind. But heck, it worked. He was done peeing and had his pants back on by the time they reached him. I think about this a lot anytime he pops up in my LinkedIn feed after another promotion, that man is moving up fast.

  498. mc*

    I was asked to skinny dip by my boss at a lab party!

    I was working as a summer intern in a biochemistry lab at a famous university. It was a hot day and the lab didn’t have AC, so the head of the lab insisted that everyone stop working for the afternoon and come to his house for a pool party. I was living at home and commuting to work by bus which was 1.5 hr each way, so I came to the party without going home first and thus I didn’t have a swimsuit. In fact, most people who were at the party didn’t have their swimsuits and weren’t interested in getting nearly naked in front of their work colleagues.

    The head of the lab, who had a loud irrepressible personality and who was from France, then proceeded to squeeze into the tiniest little banana hammock swimsuit I had ever seen (he was portly and pushing 60). He kept trying to get me (the only woman in the entire lab, and also the only undergraduate) and many others there to skinny dip in the pool, saying that Americans were too prudish etc.

    It was super uncomfortable! I didn’t want to offend him because I needed his recommendation for graduate school, but……!

    Later, I got to know him a little better and I realized he wasn’t being creepy, he was just not culturally very well adjusted and he lacked a filter. Another weird thing is that he would never swear in French and spoke very elegantly in his own language. However, when he spoke English he swore constantly, F-ing this, sh*t that, in every single sentence. He was not only a brilliant scientist but also ended up significantly helping my career and those of many others, too.

  499. Cincinnati*

    When I was young (& stupid) I worked as a secretary at a chemical factory. As part of the hiring process, we had to do drug tests and the like. For my drug test, the factory nurse and I went into the only women’s bathroom, which was in the cold basement, I had to strip naked, leave the door of the freezing bathroom stall door open, pee into a cup, and then give her the sample. She messed up the process 3 times.

    At the same company, I had to go over to the research lab and smell several samples of chemicals and give my impressions (smells like chicken soup, smells like bandaids, etc.). This was a place that manufactured phthalates and plasticizers. Luckily my children are somewhat normal and I haven’t developed any weirdo cancers yet.

  500. calonkat*

    OK, these are more office rules and interpretations thereof than boss requests, but here goes:

    Was a government assistant in the midwest, and we were told we had to get official airline quotes for a flight to an out of town conference. OK, but the airport was an hour and a half away, with fee parking, and the conference was a 2 hour drive away and people were going to carpool. It probably cost us the same amount for the time we spent gathering enough documentation and doing math to prove that 2-4 people sharing a car for 100 miles was cheaper than individual flights, parking, and taxis from the airport to the conference city (next to the town with the airport).

    Same agency, was getting rooms for someone doing a training “tour” around the state. I was told specifically I had to call every motel and make sure I was getting the cheapest room. I did my best, but when I was asked about one town that seemed to have really high rates, I said it was homecoming at one of the state universities and I was lucky to find a room at any rate. When pressed on if I’d really tried EVERY motel, I admitted there was one I hadn’t tried. AHA! They had me. I was about to get written up? yelled at? when I said it was because the motel was near the interstate and had huge signs up about their “hourly rates”. A moment of silence and then they admitted they wouldn’t make even a government employee stay in that motel for multiple nights.

    1. TimesChange*

      Now I’m imagining them asking you to calculate if they rented the room for exactly 7 hours, if that would be cheaper or not ( 6.5 hours of sleep, 15 minutes each side to get ready for bed/day).

      1. calonkat*

        I was horrified throughout the “moment of silence” imagining: yes, that they’d make me calculate the hourly rate and find out if the motel did offer overnight rates; the news stories about a female government employee on state business staying there (this is the midwest, our “big towns” are small towns for people on the coasts); the thought of the decontamination you’d want to do on everything that touched the floor and anything else.

  501. Mazey's Mom*

    Couldn’t decide which one was worse so here are my top 3:

    #1: Eons ago I worked at a Job Corps center as a residential advisor. We were the people who staffed the dorms so we were on staff only during swing and night shifts during the week, and all day on the weekends and holidays. The center in its infinite wisdom decided that every RA had to get a CDL to drive their rickety school buses to transport students if/as needed outside of 8 to 5 M-F. If we didn’t it was grounds for dismissal. However, they refused to provide training, and any training we did get had to be done on our own time and on our own dime. Most of us were barely making a livable wage. My on-the-road training consisted of 1 hour after a night shift with a supervisor who kindly volunteered his time, then it was off to the DMV for the tests. Written test, no problems. Driving test – a nightmare! I remember 2 women (one in the bus to review my work, one outside), a bunch of orange cones that I consistently ran over (parallel park a BUS??!!), and 4 very raised eyebrows when I told them how much time I had on the road and the penalties for not getting the license.
    I passed the test.
    And yes, I did have to drive the bus. Frequently on the weekends to transport students to the airport or other events. Even took a bunch of them to Denver one weekend (9 hours each way), and I was given the choice of having a bus with a newly-installed transmission or a one with working windshield wipers. Choices, choices!

    #2: Right after college I worked for a national retailer of women’s fashions for the larger sizes. Was hired as an assistant store manager and since it was an exempt position, my normal work week was 45 hours or more. No overtime pay, no holiday pay, and there were certain times of the year that I wouldn’t be permitted to take vacation time. My aunt died and the memorial service happened on one of those restricted Saturdays. They reluctantly allowed me the 1 day off. My brother got married on the weekend before Thanksgiving. Gave my boss several months’ notice when I found out the date and was told by her and her boss that I wouldn’t be given the time off and would be fired if I went. I told them that (a) this was my one and only sibling, (b) I was in the wedding party, and (c) I’d work every weekend and holiday thereafter to make up for it. They wouldn’t budge. I hedged a bit, but after weeks of pressure by them (“Are you working it or do we need to hire a new assistant manager?”), finally gave them my notice. Kind of a relief actually – I hated working with the other assistant manager, who hated me from day 1 because she found out by the store manager I made $1000 more than her because of my college degree, and just could not let it go. Was nice to finally be able to tell her where to stick it the last time we worked a shift together.

    #3: And maybe the most disgusting one…I had to collect poop from my colleagues. Most of us came down with food poisoning (including me) after a lunch meeting, and my boss contacted the health department, who wanted samples from us to confirm the diagnosis. As a lowly admin assistant, guess who was the designated drop off point! The health department contacted the (very popular) restaurant and did an inspection, who then contacted me since I ordered the food and chewed me out because they’re “very popular and this has never happened to them and no way are they going to refund our money”. The health department did turn up some findings but the restaurant stayed in business for years, only closing recently because of the pandemic. I just never ordered from them again.

  502. CoveredinBees*

    During Hurricane Sandy (as in while the hurricane was actively wrecking havoc on NYC), I was told that I had to report to my office despite the office being in a mandatory evacuation zone. Also, all public transit was shut down and only emergency vehicles were allowed on the street. I was told to walk the length of Manhattan in the midst of a raging storm. They later relented and “allowed” me to work from an alternate worksite in Queens, which was inaccessible because all the bridges and tunnels were closed and the flood waters eventually shut down the building. Despite being *able* to do my work remotely, I wasn’t allowed to because my job title wasn’t high enough. So, my work was important enough to risk my life walking to but not enough to do from my home.

    If you’re wondering, I was an attorney working on regulatory issues for an NYC agency.

  503. mc*

    I was asked to help paint my boss’ house – on a weekend!

    This was when I had just gotten my Ph.D. in Biochemistry and I was working in this guy’s lab as a federally -funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow. My official duties were conducting research in the lab, writing research papers and publishing them, writing grants, etc. It was typically an 80 hr / week job. (for really low pay – at the time, $23K/yr)

    My boss called me up and told me he was asking everyone in his lab to come help paint his house this weekend. When I said “what? no thanks, are you nuts!?” he said everyone else was doing it, and (ha ha, he said it was like a joke) only people who showed up would get time on one of our critical lab instruments for their research projects. I called up some others from the lab to get their advice, and they said “oh yeah, you bet we are going, because he will totally screw you over if you don’t show up”. So I showed up. And painted his house in the hot sun along with everyone else (ugh).

    This guy was also fond of holding “required” poker parties for everyone in the lab, where you had to smoke cigars and drink whiskey and laugh at his dumb jokes about feminists. As the only woman in the lab, I had to go along and show I was a “good sport”. Eventually, I refused to attend any more of these stupid parties and then I quit his lab for a better one.

    Decades later, we ran into each other at some professional event and he made a point of apologizing for being such a sexist asshole. It was nice to hear that he finally “grew up”, but I never really forgave him for making my time in his lab so miserable. I was there to learn about his research area but it was mostly a long hazing session to see how much crap I would put up with.

  504. This might explain my boundary issues*

    1. Delay my long-planned honeymoon to be available to respond to an RFA that *might* be issued while I would be gone. (I said no, which caused angst… and the RFA came out 2 months after I returned.)

    2. Smuggle medical supplies and electronics into a foreign country to avoid paying duties (because my boss was a cheapskate)

    3. Scan an older male coworker’s vacation photos for him. They were beach photos and he sported speedos in all of them. (It was my first job, and I had the only scanner in the company. I reported it to my manager and coworker got into trouble for asking.)

    4. Send a grantee $400 of my own money via Western Union when she got stranded in a 3rd country trying to get a visa to attend a conference we invited her to. It’s a long story, but I was asked to fix the problem without being given any resources. I was very young and I did it. My organization eventually reimbursed me.

    5. Ask a direct report to format a (non-urgent) document on the first day of her planned vacation. When I refused, my boss sent the document to UpWork the day before my direct report’s vacation ended and then made me manage the truly terrible UpWork contractor.

    6. My coworker’s experience, but I was there: Repatriate our boss’ remains, after arranging for cremation in a country where cremation is uncommon. [It turned out to be an outdoor pyre.] It was a tragic, unexpected death, and someone had to handle the arrangements, but it was definitely a “not in the job description” situation.

  505. Sandy*

    I worked at a drop-in center for people with mental illnesses. One Saturday afternoon we were having a picnic, with a handful of staff members and maybe fifteen clients. My supervisor pulled me into an office and told me she was feeling strongly attracted to one of the clients and asked me to stick close to her and make sure she didn’t “jump his bones.”

    I was pretty young, in my early twenties, and I literally did not know what to say to this. I think I nodded and then I tried to keep her in eyesight the rest of the afternoon, but it was so uncomfortable and I really didn’t have any idea what I was supposed to do if she did start to “jump his bones.”

    She didn’t, so that part was good. And I was let go from that job a few months later, which in retrospect was a good thing.

  506. sometimeswhy*

    As a workstudy/intern during my sophomore year of college, I was asked to do an inventory and hazardous waste disposal for my college’s entire chemistry department. I was given a key to a poorly-ventilated basement staging area, keys to all the instructional chem labs on campus (not the research ones), and zero (0) instructions on how, like not even contact information for the disposal company or information about the regulations.

    There was really toxic stuff, really mild stuff, really reactive stuff, and really reactive!-with!-each!-other! stuff. I was, and am, an over-preparer so it wasn’t really luck that kept me from blowing an entire city block into the sky or accidentally release something into the HVAC but please believe me when I tell you that there was the potential to do that several times over.

    This was the same job where I had to trudge across campus, soaking wet, to interrupt a class to tell a professor that his son was on the way to the hospital after his organic chemistry experiment blew up in his face. I was the one who pulled him under the safety shower and stood there with him.

  507. Favorite_Auntie*

    I used to have a second job as a bartender, while working in IT during the week. It was at a very Cheers-y neighborhood bar, with lots of regulars. One night while I was working solo behind the bar, a couple of regulars had a birthday party that included a female stripper. At one point, the entire crowd trapped me behind the bar and (I kid you not) wouldn’t let me out until I had licked whipped cream off the stripper’s bosom. I was a single 30-year old girl who found this mortifying, disgusting and beyond anything I could imagine in a workplace scenario. Still grosses me out many years later, and is equally infuriating that I was forced into this situation, because any noncompliance would have lost those precious regular customers. Ugh.

  508. CommanderBanana*

    Right out of college, I worked for a small defense contractor that was being run into the ground by the new owner, who had no background in contracting, federal government, IT, or working with the DoD, and was an all-around POS. We were working on proposals and at one point, I had been at the office working for literally over 24 hours straight. I should have quit, but my Puritan-work-ethic-bootstraps-maybe-just-work-harder-workaholic-life-is-work parents don’t understand the concept of leaving toxic jobs, and when I was fired for refusing to continue working 25+ consecutive hours, convinced me it was All My Fault and I Was a Bad Person for getting fired (this same place hired and fired 11 people in a 3-person department in about 9 months, so).

  509. Big Bird*

    A recent comment just reminded me of the time I had scheduled a family vacation to Hawaii to celebrate my MIL’s 80th birthday. The entire extended family was going, including my mother, also 80, and it had taken many, many months of planning. I was later informed that since we had recently been acquired and were switching over to our acquirer’s software during the time I was scheduled to be off, I would have to skip the vacation. I refused and gave my notice, effective the day before I was scheduled to leave. They relented, and I had the best vacation of my life up to that point. Predictably, the software deployment was delayed by three months so I was there for it anyway. Less predictably, the acquiring company laid us all off 6 months later, making all that work totally useless.

  510. Rather Confused and Amused*

    So at one of my former jobs one afternoon, I received a series of phone calls on my work phone that I thought were scams. I thought nothing more of it until the next day when my manager pulled me aside and told me that the phone calls were from their bail bondsman. My manager could only remember the company number and had wanted me to come post their bail and get them home via my credit card and vehicle. Instead, they ended up staying overnight in “the clink” as I had no idea those were real calls. In the meeting, I was told I needed to be more open-minded next time about those kind of calls……Ummmm no? That’s what your lawyer is for, not the admin?

  511. mc*

    I had to lead an important faculty meeting from *the side of the room while another faculty member (“Edwina”) was trying to lead the same meeting from the front of the room*. She refused to yield the floor or to sit down or stop talking and writing on the main white board the entire time. I had to try to talk over her and ignore her…!

    I had been appointed the Director of an important education program in our department, beating out Edwina who had previously assisted with that education program and who had wanted the Director position for herself. A full year after my appointment, I was preparing to lead one of the most important faculty meetings, the one where the faculty together weighed all the factors and interviews and selected the few lucky graduate students to admit to our prestigious education program.

    Ahead of this meeting, two different senior faculty members individually pulled me aside and warned me “not to let Edwina take over” this meeting, etc. I was like “of course not, I will be leading the meeting, don’t worry”. To make sure, I even emailed Edwina ahead of time to let her know very clearly that I planned to lead this meeting even though she had done it in the past when I wasn’t Director.

    When I went to start the meeting, Edwina was already there at the front of the room and she had already started writing information on the white board. I walked in an calmly erased what she had written and asked her to sit down, saying I would be leading the meeting and we would be using a different process than she had used in the past to consider all the candidates. Edwina totally blew up, stomped her feet and physically refused to move way from the front of the room. I asked her to please sit down repeatedly and she refused, over and over. She started writing on the white board again….Then, when the rest of the faculty arrived, including the chair of the department, they also begged her to sit down. Edwina did not – she kept writing on the white board her long lists of the students and what she saw as the most qualified and gifted and why.

    I asked the Chair, what am I supposed to do, arm wrestle her? I wanted to reschedule, but the Chair (notorious for being spineless and non confrontational) said I had to continue the meeting, saying I should just do so from the other side of the room (!) So everyone turned their chairs to the side, and I led the meeting from the side wall, while a few feet away Edwina continued to write on the main white board, stomp her feet, and fume and sputter like a radiator.

    Afterwards, I met with my Chair and demanded that he talk to Edwina and get her to correct her behavior, but I don’t think he did. A few weeks later, Edwina pulled the same trick in another meeting that I was leading, but this time I was smarter and I didn’t ask the Chair what to do. When Edwina ignored my several attempts to get her to stop talking, I just said I was cancelling the meeting and I walked out, saying to everyone that I would have to reschedule the entire meeting due to Edwina’s behavior so they would all need to put yet another meeting on their calendars due to her. Edwina had a cow and started screaming and shouting “you can’t do that!” but I just ignored her.

    At the next meeting, Edwina actually behaved herself, but she hated me intensely thereafter. My Chair never did address her behavior – she was one of his “pets” for some reason. Although Edwina didn’t personally give me any more trouble (she’s kind of afraid of me now), she’s been a continuing nightmare to many others in our Department. Unfortunately the Chair appointed her Vice Chair, so she’s probably going to be Chair at some point. She’s one of the major reasons I’m leaving for another university….!

  512. niko*

    not me but my ex used to work for a restaurant with SPECTACULARLY awful management. during a massive summer storm and flooding with warnings on tv not to drive anywhere interspersed with live footage of water rescues, she called her boss to tell him she wouldnt be able to come to work. he tried to convince her it would be safe to drive to work, a good 40min away. not that it would be safe in any car, but at the time she was driving a ‘94 acura integra, which is about a half-step up from a matchbox car and so light-weight that people often soup them up and use them for drag racing. this particular car was also notably not water-tight—if you sat in the back seat you had to make sure the back windshield hadn’t leaked all over it recently or your ass would get soaked. needless to say she did NOT go into work that night.

  513. FBEyebrows*

    I was hired at an accounting firm, and upon reporting to HR on my first day to fill out forms, I was handed a form where I slotted in for my turn to clean the kitchen/lunchroom. I told the HR lady I didn’t discuss this at hiring, so therefore was declining. Notably, the male accountants were not on the list. This was in 1981. I found a new job in 3 months. Then in 1989 at that job, we hired a new accounts receivable manager, a very nice lady who was born in Germany and had lived in the US for the past 10 years. She made the company change the way they alphabetized all the accounts because she was not familiar with American first names. It was pandemonium, as we rarely referred to account by the first name, think Ira Greenwald DDS was now filed under I, and F Smith and Sons Trucking was now filed under F. I left shortly before the company went belly up.

  514. Wicker Incident*

    I used to work at the Genius Bar and there were…so many things. I think the most outrageous was the woman who came into the store with champagne in a champagne flute, said her new Mac was out for delivery but she was busy “at a dinner,” and could one of us store employees go wait at her house for the Mac to be delivered? And sign for it?

  515. NoIWon'tDoThatThanks*

    My boss asked me to break the law and not do criminal record and background checks on people who were volunteering with minors because “not enough people were coming to volunteer due to the background check rules”.

  516. Lalaith*

    This is pretty small potatoes, but it’s my best example of what working what one particular horrid woman was like. I was a bank teller, she was a customer service rep (I’ll call her CSR). One morning I was on opening shift with her, just the two of us, and I had sprained my ankle the day before so obviously I was trying not to move around much. I had a transaction that required the signature of someone higher up the hierarchy than me – i.e. CSR – so I called over to her to ask her to come sign it. She was at her desk with another customer, who was apparently more important than my customer? Because she refused to leave her desk. She made me hobble out to her on my sprained ankle for something that would have taken her less than a minute to do for me.

    That bank was kind of weird in other ways. They wanted their tellers to be salespeople. I was not a salesperson. They didn’t offer any sort of training in it either, they just insisted that we do things like call up all of our customers to try to sell them things, or go outside and hand out flyers. I think they even tried to get us to come up with marketing ideas. Like… please just let me do my tedious job, and also don’t take away the other people doing the tedious job so that I’m the only one handling customers, please.

    Now for a fun one – I was once asked to babysit a baby walking stick insect. I was a volunteer in a museum and, at that moment, was working at the cart in the insect exhibit where I would demonstrate things to guests (and let them poke the hissing cockroaches to make them hiss :)). The baby bug had escaped some other part of the exhibit, so it just hung out on my finger for a while until it could be returned. Not unreasonable in context!

  517. Technically not an Engineer*

    Back in the early 2000s I was working as a paid intern in the PM/Engineering department of a parts manufacturing company. We had a new client whose process required us to perform a number of quality and safety tests on sample parts we made.

    One day, the department manager asked me to edit some test reports to show that we had passed the flammability testing requirements, because the sample parts weren’t even made out of the final material so the results would be pointless anyway. The QA technician had refused to change the results before he brought it to me. I refused too, on the grounds that it was an ethical violation (I had planned to apply for my professional license once I was done school), and he grumpily took it away. I was scared to push any farther than that.

    I was not offered the chance to return in a following term (for which I was glad, because the career services folks considered it to be bad form if you turned down an offer, even if there were ethical issues).

    That was my second term in that specific industry, and between that incident and a number of other sketchy occurrences I vowed never to work in it again. 18 years later, I’ve stuck to that vow.

  518. Get me out of here*

    My boss asked me to write a character witness statement for him because he refuses to learn how to use a computer. The statement was for his friend’s son who had violated a restraining order and assaulted his ex wife, in front of their young child. This was not the first time that person had run-ins with the law. They didn’t want him to have to serve real jail time because his father was a public figure and they were concerned about something happening to him in jail. I absolutely refused to be a part of any of it. I understand being concerned about your child but maybe he shouldn’t be a horrible human who assaults his ex wife. I felt if it was that important to the owner he could write it himself. I was fully willing to be fired over it because I was not going to contribute to someone who had committed that kind of crime. It was truly horrifying, especially when I asked him how he would feel if someone did that to his daughter. No good answer to that.

  519. you want me to do what now*

    I’d forgotten this, but was prompted by another comment.

    I worked as a temp at a large college – in England that’s for age 16-19 and may have practical courses like plumbing or catering as well as traditional academic subjects. All our students took external exams of one kind or another, so we had an exams department that did nothing but arrange entries, invigilation, papers, submissions, and results year-round. They had me in as a temp while they were hiring for an additional permanent full-timer.

    Anyway one of the jobs we had to do was that if a student thought their results were unfair or inaccurate, they could appeal the result (varying levels of appeal from a re-count to a full re-mark, at corresponding price points). There was a deadline for appealing and it had to be done by the exams office. Our procedure was that the boss sent them all through, because they were that important.

    One day a month or so after the appeals deadline, my boss asked me to falsify a fax receipt, so that it would appear she had sent the form through for StudentA when in reality she had forgotten. I’d use the top of the genuine receipt for StudentB and the form for StudentA, and spend a little time with a photocopier, a guillotine and a gluestick, and she would use the result to “prove” to the exam authority that she had filed the request in time and therefore they would have to honour it even though they had no record of the “original” request.

    I did not comply. I’m not sure who did, but it went through, and the student’s exam was reviewed, and the grade was revised upwards. I’m not sure how to feel about the situation.

  520. Really Boss, Really?*

    Boss tells you to finish a report before going home for the day? Totally reasonable. Now imagine, you come into work in the morning to find your colleague on floor unconscious and gasping for air, so you call 911, perform CPR and accompany the ambulance to the hospital. Your colleague never regains consciousness and her only family is across the country so you hold the phone to your now brain-dead colleague’s ear so that her sister can say goodbye. You return to the office about 4:30pm to pick up your bag, you have a pounding headache because you haven’t eaten all day, and your boss (who worked with your colleague for 18 years) tells you that you better “get back to work and finish that report” before you go home for the day.

      1. Raine*

        Seconded. The only thing that could have been worse would’ve been if the boss asked why the employee bothered to perform CPR first.

  521. mc*

    When I was a new faculty member, my Division Head wanted to hold evening Division dinner meetings at a restaurant. He said he was too busy for other meeting times, and that this would give him quality mentoring time with the Assistant Professors. At the time there were only two Assistant Professors in the Division, me and another woman. I had young children at the time, so an evening meeting was really inconvenient, but I got a babysitter and showed up at the restaurant anyway for my all important face time with the famous scientist/Division Head.

    To my surprise, he was there alone (!) because he hadn’t invited the other Assistant Professor, saying he wanted to “get to know me alone”. And he also didn’t want to talk about my work – he wanted us to “get to know each other on a personal level”. It was awkward and gross, but I pretended I didn’t get it. I insisted on talking about work during the entire dinner. The next day, I informed him that I already had my kids in daycare 12 hrs a day and I wasn’t going to add to that, so he would just have to figure out a time to meet during the day. And I refused to meet with him outside of work again. Eventually, I moved to a different department because he was a disaster in many ways and very unhelpful to my career.

    He ended up leaving the University under a cloud after the other Assistant Professor (who was married) ended up getting pregnant and having his child while refusing the entire time to name the father (the Division Head was also married and had teenage children at the time). Then they both got very messily divorced and moved in together and started teaching all their classes together. They would argue and scream at each other in class because they had a high drama relationship, and many students complained. When the University refused tenure for his girlfriend, he left for another university, taking her with him after demoting her to a postdoc in his research program. Last I heard, they are still together…15 yrs later…and both working at the other university. It’s really hard to understand why this kind of dysfunction is tolerated so much in academia!

  522. Academia4thewin*

    I have been in a meeting where a fellow grad student was asked to split his already written manuscript into two manuscript so another person in the lab could publish a first author paper off of it. I have also been asked to give my data to someone else in the lab so they could publish a paper with it. Both of these requests did not come to pass due to civil disobedience of all involved. But needless to say, I’m not in academia anymore.

    1. mc*

      Yeah, that is annoyingly very common! As Director of graduate programs, I had to handle a ton of student complaints like this. Unfortunately, the graduate school has very little power over faculty who bring in a lot of research money. The University doesn’t want to lose their research money so they refuse to permit any consequences for them. About all I could do was try to leverage peer pressure of the other faculty members to fight against such abuses – because even the most famous faculty member wants his colleagues to think he’s cool.

      1. Artemesia*

        I knew a situation where a total jerk big name big money maker/grant getter prof destroyed the career of an assistant professor because that asst prof published his own research done before joining the faculty without ‘permission’ or authorship credit for Dr. Big shot. He bad mouthed him and prevented tenure internally and undermined him externally.

        I had a female grad student who left that department’s PhD program because of his sexist and sexual harassing behavior. None of this lead to consequences for Dr. Big shot.

  523. Easy Bake Coven*

    While working for an ice cream place that did cakes I was reprimanded and was threatened with withholding my paycheck for throwing away expired cakes. I was told the expiration date was only for the frosting, not the ice cream, so I should scrape the frosting off, re-frost them, and put a new expiration date on them.

  524. Not in my job description*

    Not me, but something I witnessed a coworker asked to do: My first job was at a fast food restaurant. The toilet in the men’s restroom got clogged and then someone proceeded to do their business on top of the clog. We didn’t have a lot of customers that day and all of the employees on that shift happened to be women, so it was awhile before we knew about the issue. By then it had created an epic stench. The manager started gagging as soon as she stepped into the restroom, so she bailed out to the back room and sent one of my coworkers in with a plunger. My coworker pulled the collar of her shirt up over her nose and headed in, but after a couple minutes the smell got to her and she vomited inside her shirt which was still pulled up over her nose. She made her way to the back room and was standing over the trashcan trying to untuck her shirt so she could empty the vomit into the trash. Well, it turns out the manager was a sympathy puker, and started throwing up in the trash can while my coworker was still trying to deal with the vomit in her shirt.

  525. Anonymoose*

    My job asked me to continue services in a quarantined home because “I was vaccinated so it was totally safe!” And I still truly don’t understand what their logic was with that

  526. mc*

    When I was an Assistant Professor who newly joined a department, I was given a office that had previously been the office of a postdoctoral fellow, Wakeen. Wakeen was the favorite trainee of my former department chair, a very famous older scientist

    I was told that Wakeen was psychologically traumatized by having to give up his office space, and therefore I had to keep Wakeen’s nameplate on the door of my office and also I had to “let” Wakeen physically open the door to my office several times a day because he was OCD and had to do this or he would have a meltdown or something.

    Naturally, the first thing I did when I moved into my office was to toss Wakeen’s nameplate into the trash and put up my own nameplate. Wakeen then started a stealth campaign in retaliation , opening my office door slightly and slamming it again several times each day, and then running away so I couldn’t catch him to discuss his behavior.

    I eventually got fed up with this. The lunchroom was right next to my office where multiple students, postdocs, and technicians would typically gather to eat. One day, Wakeen did his door open/slam trick and I heard him go into the lunchroom. So I barged into the lunchroom and said really loudly so everyone could hear “Wakeen! Why are you running away? If you have to barge into my office all the time, at LEAST stop long enough to sit down and say “hi”! Why are you so unfriendly that you run away?” Everyone started snickering and laughing at him, especially his own lab members who were aware of his passive aggressive tricks. He stuttered out some kind of reply, while I kept loudly talking like I expected us to become good friends etc. Wakeen never did the door open/slam trick again, which was fantastic.

  527. Former Radio Guy*

    Very early in my radio announcing career I worked for a small AM station where the tower lights had a rhythmic hum in the on air signal at night. We also had to manually turn the tower lights off and on (when normally they’d be set with a timer). We aired high school sports on the station and one night we were airing a basketball game (I was running the studio end while the play by play guy was broadcasting via portable transmitter). The remote transmitter signal for home games was always clear since the signal was only traveling a couple of miles maximum, but this was a road game about thirty miles away so the remote signal was weak enough that the hum of the tower lights overrode it, so the station manager asked me to turn off the tower lights while we were broadcasting the game (which is a big FCC no no). I did, but I may have gotten the station engineer who had come in to troubleshoot potential signal issues with the remote transmitter to sign on the engineering log, instead of me. I landed a job at a bigger station a few months later.

  528. Raine*

    As a young, twenty-something administrative assistant temping in a major Floridian city withouot good bus service, I was asked to cash a $3,000 check. On my personal account. From the person I was reporting to for the day. Mind you, I had only walked in the door 20 minutes before, so they didn’t know me, and I was not scheduled to be there the next day. I was the receptionist they had called a temp agency to send in for the day.
    I refused, and when they pressed, I picked up the phone and called my agency rep to ask. They were horrified and said to tell the person no, and that they would call and talk to that person.
    Well, they did that, and then the person was like, “But why??? They did a background check on you, didn’t they?”
    I’m like: “No, and even if they did, how do you know I won’t just take that money and never come back?”
    They looked at me like they had never considered that idea.
    Another place had an executive who wanted me to arrange for their dog boarding at a place they knew was already booked, because they had been told it was, and was hoping that by having me call, the place would bend their rules. Once I said it wasn’t my dog and whose it was, the person at the boarding place warned me the exec was notorious for asking their admins to book for them last minute and that she had been warned not to do it or they would refuse her service. So when I came back and told her what I had been told, she said, “Well, you should’ve said it was your dog.” Um, how about no?

  529. HomerJaySimpson*

    I was brand new (less than 2 weeks) at a nuclear power plant, and we had a “thermal event” (i.e. a small fire) in an electronic cabinet that my work center was responsible for. I went down to the plant with the team that was doing troubleshooting and repairs to be a good team player and all that.
    About two hours in, we had the cabinet, which was about the size of an elevator completely full of electrical components, opened up and partially disassembled. My boss saw me looking over someone’s shoulder while to see what they were doing, and goes “Hey Homer, you’re pretty small, come here. Can you stick your head in there-“ he points inside the cabinet “and see if that big black transformer on the side smells burnt?”
    Me: “Wasn’t this thing JUST on fire?”
    Him: “It’s not on fire NOW. And if that bit smells more burned than they rest, we’ll know what caused it. Then we can fix it and everyone can go home.”
    I did stick my head in the cabinet. It smelled burned, so we pulled it out and replaced it. To be fair, my boss stuck his head in once the transformer was out so he could see if there was any other burn damage, he just couldn’t have fit when the transformer was still in.

  530. mountainshadows299*

    So, this isn’t THAT bad, but… Years ago I was a case manager for an adult day program for people with intellectual/developmental disabilities (well known nonprofit). The program manager (my supervisor) asked me to break the sad news that we were asking one of the participants to leave the program (she had a major dual diagnosis that our facility just couldn’t handle and she was starting to scare other program participants). So, I went to the team meeting and informed the provider, residential provider, and guardian. Immediately the provider and residential providers started yelling at me. I told them they could speak with my supervisor and I left the meeting to grab my supervisor. Unfortunately, she was known for being a doormat and she immediately threw me under the bus, despite the fact that SHE had asked me to do this. The program participant stayed in the program. My grand boss heard about the incident, and because my boss decided to blame the entire thing on me, grandboss was livid. She “wrote me up”- to this day, not sure what for, and told me I HAD to go to lunch with the provider and residential provider and apologize to them in person. I was going to do it because I had no choice- I couldn’t afford to lose my job. But! Grandboss was asked to resign a couple weeks later. The rumor was grandboss was found embezzling from the nonprofit, but because she had been around so long they allowed her to resign. The Grandboss who came after her informed me that first Grandboss never sent my “write up” to HR, in part because she COULDN’T write me up for that or force me to go to lunch to apologize. First Grandboss just lied about all of it! (I was in my 20s and didn’t know anything about HR, so this was news to me). I wish I could say working for that nonprofit got better, but it didn’t… Luckily though, doormat boss was demoted not long after this incident (for bad management- she just wasn’t good at managing the program).

  531. libraryfairyjess*

    Once a staff member at the theatre company I was interning at asked me if I could fill out a multi-page survey he’d gotten in the mail about crime in his neighborhood. I gave it a perfunctory scan and then handed it back, stating that since I didn’t know anything about living in his neighborhood, I couldn’t actually fill out the survey. It was such a weird interaction that I sometimes wonder if he was just testing me to see if I’d do it.

  532. CatCat*

    Back when I was in college, the campus police department hired students to help work security at events and also just generally to be helpful to event go-ers who didn’t know their way around. Basically, we were eyes on the ground with radios we could use to call each other and, if necessary, a police officer. I worked at this job and when we worked at events, we wore bright jackets with big letters on the back that said, “University Security.”

    At one event near the main grassy square on campus, there was a small group protesting nearby, I don’t even remember what they were protesting. This is fine. It’s a public university. Knock yourselves out. One of this group came up to me and a co-worker and asked if we could take their poster board signs and rip them in half. They wanted to take pictures of this. We were like, “No, why would we do that? Your group is fine.” This guy would not take no for an answer. He said we were not being helpful and we needed to do this. When we continued to refuse, he insisted we call a supervisor (this would have just been a fellow student) so we did. And the supervisor laughed and told him no, but then said if it was super important to the guy, the supervisor would take off his “University Security” jacket and the supervisor would be happy to oblige. The protestor guy got really mad because this didn’t fit the narrative he wanted to construct and photograph. At any rate, he went back to his little group in a huff.

    It was just so odd that this guy thought we should help him stage this.

  533. Quiet Liberal*

    My boss had surgery and not only couldn’t drive for a month afterwards, but also couldn’t do basic stuff like pull on a top without help. Rather than have a friend help her out, she told me she needed a ride home after work. I was ok with that, but when we got there, she told me to come inside her house with her. She told me to follow her into her bedroom and asked me to pull her top over her head and unhook her bra and help her off with it, then help her pull on her pajama top. I was speechless, but I did it. I didn’t think I could say no. I’ll never forget my horror when I realized I was helping her with such an intimate thing without having been asked/warned. It was super creepy.

  534. Robyn*

    Medical billing here! I was asked by my manager/owner to change dates of service on some claims that were past timely filling. Nope, not happening.

  535. EchoGirl*

    So, this is more of a systemic thing and not all that exciting, but I worked at a place once where the entire structure seriously overestimated the amount of control that employees had over a certain computer system that was central to our work. I can’t be too specific without also being identifying, but suffice to say that all of the company policies effectively blamed any output errors on the employee not doing the input well enough, even though it was known by everyone who worked there that it was a lot more complicated than that. And no, it wasn’t just about overlooking errors — correcting an error was considered to mitigate, but not nullify, the error, so we’d still get dinged even if we corrected it right away. (We weren’t watched all day every day, but we were monitored randomly, so you could be being observed at any time.) I know some of the floor supervisors actually felt bad about having to ding us when they could tell we weren’t at fault, but they didn’t have discretion on the matter or the power to push back.

    (As mentioned, I’m deliberately not saying what the company/line of work was for anonymity’s sake, but if you think you know the company based on this description, you’re probably right. It did have to do with telephones, I’ll say that much.)

  536. Mel Abbey*

    I was helping in HR at a fulfillment facility where we were closing on a weekly basis due to COVID exposures. Employees were being terminated for gross misconduct for coming in with the virus while the HR Manager decided to work from home for months. Her excuse was that her brother’s family was visiting from a location with high COVID rates so for the safety and welfare (“in the best interest…) of the employees, she was working from home. Incidentally, on a call with her, I asked her what she did for the weekend: Took my brother and his family to the outlet mall for retail therapy.
    Anyway, my daughter tested positive and came home from college. I told the HR Manager and she said, “You can still come in. It’s no big deal.” I was like, wait—I’m not about to be terminated for gross misconduct. I refused and let her know I was following the company policy and testing after the incubation period. She was FURIOUS. She said “Get tested. Send me the results and if they’re negative, please come in. Now I have to find someone to backfill.” Not my problem.
    PS, one of my tasks was to temp check every employee who entered the building so I could potentially (had I been positive), infect everyone.

  537. Soupspoon McGee*

    My boss told me to wear a padded bra or pasties because my “ping-poing,” AKA nipples, were apparent through my sweater. She then told me she’d talked to HR already and threatened to write me up, so that wasn’t an avenue. This was my first office job at a Catholic university, and she told me I was making all the men uncomfortable. Anyway, I told her they didn’t make padded bras in my slightly larger size, but I’m sure she could find them in her size. Yeah, I’m petty, but I’ll take it.

  538. Not in the food industry anymore*

    I tell people this story and it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.

    I was a student and worked at the only overnight diner as a shift manager in a small college town. At about 1:30 am with a restaurant full of people I was informed that there was sewage backing up through the floor drain in the mens restroom. I immediately called the GM to let them know about the issue so they could get a repair person and that I was closing the restaurant. Their response? “Put a handwritten unisex sign on the women’s restroom and continue to stay open”

    I hung up the phone and made an announcement to the whole restaurant that we were closing immediately. Anyone who had already received their food was comped, and anyone who hadn’t received their food their order was cancelled.

    I sent the whole shift team home and locked the front door. I turned my keys in the next day.

    I received a call from the regional manager (this was a chain) the next day, asking me not to quit. I stood my ground and said that I couldn’t work for a GM that would put patrons health at risk.

    Still by far the most bizarre and appalling thing that has ever happened to me at a job.

  539. Libby*

    I once worked as a research assistant for a professor. I had a 40% appointment. After working for her for about 2 months, she asked to take me out to lunch, where she told me that a 40% appointment meant I still worked full time, I just got paid 40% of what she did because she was the boss. (In reality, I didn’t even make nowhere near 40% of what she did. And she knew when I took the job that I was also teaching two classes at the community college and that that was why I needed limited hours.)

    She also gave me regular assignments where I had to grind down kidney stones to be used as samples in a microscope. The grinding processes would regularly hurt the tips of my fingers enough that they bled. She was unconcerned.

    I lasted a semester before I fled.

  540. Social Svcs Gal*

    I was in my early 20s and had been in a social services job at a non-profit for a few weeks or so. My boss told me to go to one of our client’s homes for a home visit and tell them that it was suspected there was incest going on in their home.

  541. Other Duties of Assigned*

    This one happened to my sister (from the northern U.S.), while working at a major corporation in one of their offices in the south.

    One summer, one of her coworkers had been injured at his home (which was under construction) and the boss thought it would be nice gesture if the entire office showed up on a Friday (instead of, you know, working for the company) to install sod for his new lawn. The team members were given the option of working in the morning or afternoon. My sister wanted neither, offering to stay at the office and put in her regular hours. Nope, she was told she couldn’t opt out, so she grudgingly selected the morning, hoping it would be slightly cooler. It made little difference as the temperatures were over 100F by mid-morning and being newly arrived from the north, she was not able to handle the heat. She soon suffered heat exhaustion/heat stroke, with dizziness, being unable to talk, etc. The other workers got her in the air conditioned house, put cold towels on her, etc. (and probably should have called 911). When she felt somewhat better, she excused herself and left. Also, the boss didn’t see any of this as he was on the afternoon shift. No apology ever, either (“you’re probably just not used to the heat”). Even though this was over two decades ago, to this day, she has difficulty tolerating sun and heat.

    1. Artemesia*

      I was once the keynote speaker for a conference for educators and much of it was focused on community service integrated into education. So they had arranged for participants to do a community service gig in the morning before the kick off luncheon for which I was to speak.

      I was fine with participating in this — a particularly enthusiastic college student organizer wanted me on his team — his team was weeding a field in the sun removing invasive species. So dressed to speak I was to do stoop labor in the hot sun all morning. I noped out of there and joined a team going to a nursing home — indoors, air conditioned. He was so disappointed. It was hard to fathom that he really thought it appropriate to have someone who was to give a speech right after these service events (and who was well into middle age and in heels and a suit) weeding in the hot sun, but he sure did.

  542. old curmudgeon*

    In my first sort of quasi-professional (in that it was in an office rather than retail or restaurant work) job, I was an inventory/payroll clerk for a small local company. The “Corporate Office” was a string of dank, windowless 1950s-era rooms that had been cobbled together in one corner of the company’s cavernous warehouse, and about a dozen underpaid employees (all female) toiled at keeping the books manually, writing checks by hand, manually recording inventory on file cards, and creating ad paste-ups with actual scissors and paste. Meanwhile, the old-money-wealthy (male) company president, who we’ll call “Sheldon Black,” sat in his office and tried to look like a businessman, while also doing his level best to avoid actually ever doing any work.

    Sheldon was obscenely wealthy, but he was dumb as a box of rocks and he had the personality of a rabbit. He was also the most hen-pecked man I have ever met personally. Sheldon’s wife, who we’ll call “Naomi,” would get him on the phone and harangue him literally for hours – HOURS – complaining about her maid (of course she had a live-in maid), her car (always the biggest, latest-model Cadillac available), their house (a mansion with nine bedrooms and twelve bathrooms), their kids’ teachers (but only the Black or Hispanic ones), an insufficiently obsequious store clerk — you get the picture.

    Of course, the reason Sheldon was such a perfect target for these hours-long harangues was the fact that he was a totally inept nonentity in the business, and never had any actual, you know, WORK to do. So any time Naomi wanted to yell at him for an hour or three, she knew he’d always be available.

    However, over the years, Sheldon had developed a coping mechanism of sorts to deal with this. He’d gather up a double arm-full of newspapers, magazines, catalogs, junk mail and other assorted material, and he would happily disappear into the men’s room, where he would stay for hours at a time. He was the only male in the office, so it was in effect his own private restroom, and in those days, decades before cell phones, it was also the only place in that entire huge warehouse-office complex where Naomi couldn’t get him on the phone.

    Now, I was the inventory/payroll clerk, but I was also responsible for answering the phone and transferring the calls to the appropriate person. So all those calls from Naomi came to me first before getting transferred to Sheldon the hen-pecked rabbit. Which leads to my contribution to the list of unreasonable tasks.

    See, Naomi was very impatient and never wanted to be bothered speaking to mere peons like the 24-year-old minimum-wage clerk who answered the phone. So the conversations would go something like this:

    Me: Black’s Corpora —
    Naomi: I need to talk to Sheldon right now, put me through to him immediately!
    Me: I am sorry, Mr. Black is away from his desk at the mo–
    Naomi: Is he in the bathroom again?!!?? You put this phone down and march your little butt over there and knock on the door and tell him to get off that pot and come talk to me NOW!!
    Me: ———-
    Naomi: Did you hear me, stupid girl?! Go over there and get him out of the bathroom, I need to talk to him!
    Me: Erm. I don’t thi–
    Naomi: NOW, I SAID! Go get him!!
    Me: I am very sorr–
    CLICK – she’d hang up on me.

    And within minutes, seventy feet of gleaming chrome and paint would come roaring up the street, screech to a halt at the door, and Naomi herself, redfaced and furious, would dismount from her Cadillac, stalk in the door and pitch an in-person temper tantrum until Sheldon emerged from the dubious safety of the men’s room to meekly take his tongue-lashing in person.

    I’m in my sixties now, and I’ve had some pretty strange and occasionally unreasonable tasks thrown at me over the past four decades. But none of them have ever come close to being ordered – repeatedly – to go drag the company president out of the bathroom so his wife could yell at him.

  543. Meeeeeeeee*

    My husband had a boss ask him to talk to a newer coworker about hygiene and grooming. Coworker was showing up noticeably unwashed and grubby to what was basically an office job – and not because of any limitations or socioeconomic issues, the guy was just kind of a stoner who didn’t care much that he was smelly.

    The boss, a woman, thought the message would be less embarrassing for the guy coming from another male. As you might expect, my husband was not very happy that he had to be the one to have the awkward conversation that one should come to work smelling clean and in clean clothes.

    1. Artemesia*

      I was the highest ranking woman in my department and so got this precise task with women staff whom the chair felt had to be ‘counseled’ about their hygiene or attire — it is sooo not fun but I do think it is even less fun if it is across genders. On the other hand when a visiting international professor came to the office drenched in cologne that literally gave me a headache — none of the men were willing to take that on. I spent the semester with my office door firmly closed as the stench was everywhere in the office area.

  544. Not happening bro*

    Was requested to come in when I was on sick leave with a kidney stone and kidney infection (read 104.5 temp in the age of temp checks) for “just a few hours to make the schedule” I wasn’t even capable of showering at that point I was so sick. My boss had only been my boss for 2 days at the time.

  545. okaythen*

    My partner once got fired (for three hours) from the delicatessen he worked at for refusing to jump up and down on the dumpster so that they could pack more trash in. It wasn’t the first firing from there or the last.

  546. Raine*

    Probably the story that gets everyone going is from back when I coordinated continuing education courses. I worked in a department of three people – myself, the registrar, and the department manager. The registrar got promoted to be my boss. She gets stopped in the hallway by a course director, who tells her the date he wants his annual course to be held, and she – not thinking this through – says, “Sure!”
    Then she comes back to our office and tells me the date.
    I stare at her in dismay. “That’s my wedding date.”
    “Oh, but that’s three months away. Can’t you change it?”

    1. Coffee time!*

      lol yes I had a toxic boss to who asked me to change my wedding date but at least was more do you think ? cus a big event was happening that the company got ..already was doing it in off season. So less people could come to wedding but no big deal more courtesy invites. One restaurant when young..boyfriend sister getting married..got my shift covered told manager about it..and he asks can’t it be changed. Also the same place that had a gang shooting inside at night and they didn’t tell me (worked early shift) so had the newspeople at my door with me going what? and two coffee cups covered in blood in the kitchen… only worked a month there. Restaurant didn’t last.

  547. onyxzinnia*

    Not too many stories from my current job, but the last one was a doozy:
    – Gave a showroom tour to 18 people who didn’t speak English (with less than 24 hours’ notice).
    – Drove 2+ hours in a blizzard to host a client visit with 12 catered lunch boxes for the meeting. Client sent a cancellation notice right when I arrived at the site. Not that I could have even parked my car since there were 18 inches of unplowed snow in the parking lot.
    – Filed expense reports, booked travel and accommodation, created NDAs and updated timecards for the entire company because no one could be bothered to learn the HR software. I even had to file the company’s state tax certification.
    – My boss lived in Canada and flew to our US office only 2 days a week. I was required to sit in an empty office for months, even on Christmas Eve, just in case some prospect stopped by unexpectedly for a visit. No one ever did.
    – I asked my boss at the time if I could be promoted to Business Development Manager since the rest of the department had quit and I was the only one left. Also the only current employee with a non-managerial title. I was told no, but I could be an Office Manager instead.

    Thankfully far far away from all that nonsense now.

  548. Hamster*

    When I was in college, I worked summers in an office in my home town. The boss couldn’t type, so he’d write letters to his clients by hand and give them to one of us to type. One day everyone else was out to lunch when I heard him shouting on the phone. He was very volatile so it wasn’t uncommon. A few minutes later he comes out with a letter for me to type up. It was to the client he had been on the phone with, and started out, “Dear Idiot.” I tried to talk him down but he wasn’t having any of it. I finally said I wouldn’t type a letter like that, at which point he started shouting that he would fire me if I didn’t type it. I really needed the job but I just said, “Then you’ll have to fire me.” So he did. But as i was walking across the parking lot to get home, he came running out, begging me to stay. I hadn’t realized til that day that the key to dealing with his rages was to call his bluff. Two years later when I graduated from college, he sent me flowers and a note that he was proud of me.

  549. The Bathroom Sign*

    I work in retail. We frequently have issues with the toilet in our public restroom and management is unfortunately slow to fix any problems with the store. At one point we had closed the restroom to customers for over a week because it took several tries for the toilet to flush properly. Customers usually gave up trying to flush it and the resulting buildup of toilet paper from multiple customers caused the toilet to frequently become clogged. And that was when there was only toilet paper in the bowl–the mess after customers went #2 was often indescribable.

    Even after explaining the issue, our owner was reluctant to keep the bathroom closed because she was afraid of upsetting customers. She asked me to create a sign for the bathroom telling customers that they could only use it to go #1, not #2, and that they needed to throw their used toilet paper in the trash can instead of flushing it. Astounded and unable to even begin to consider how I would compose such a sign, I busied myself with other things during the rest of my shift and hoped that she would forget about it. Fortunately she never brought it up again, and a few days later the toilet’s flushing issues were mysteriously resolved.

  550. This Dragon Is Powered By Tea*

    Many, many years ago, when everyone was freaking out that the Y2K bug was going to cause a world apocalypse, my boss was also freaking out. Now, if the university’s payroll systems had gone down, that might have been a crisis, but we were only responsible for email and web services, and while those shutting down would have been bad, it would not have been the end of the world. And anyway, we’d already patched them against the bug.

    No, no, that was insufficient! Something else might go wrong, and the email must stay up. We would draw straws, he declared, and the two who got the short straws would camp out on the server room floor overnight, in sleeping bags, with some tinned food and a can opener – because, you see, the badge readers might go offline due to Y2K, and then we couldn’t get into the server room. And it must be two of us for redundancy, in a server room that was kept at about 50F/10C on a warm day. Oh, and we could have a lidded bucket to pee in, in case the plumbing went out, because we must not leave the server room under any circumstances.

    We told him that if he really was that concerned, he could sleep on the server room floor with his tins of food and his lidded bucket, and open the door for us if the servers died and badge readers went offline. He declined.

  551. Hamster*

    Looks like this didn’t post. Hope it doesn’t end up a duplicate.

    When I was in college, I worked summers in an office in my home town. The boss couldn’t type, so he’d write letters to his clients by hand and give them to one of us to type. One day everyone else was out to lunch when I heard him shouting on the phone. He was very volatile so it wasn’t uncommon. A few minutes later he comes out with a letter for me to type up. It was to the client he had been on the phone with, and started out, “Dear Idiot.” I tried to talk him down but he wasn’t having any of it. I finally said I wouldn’t type a letter like that, at which point he started shouting that he would fire me if I didn’t type it. I really needed the job but I just said, “Then you’ll have to fire me.” So he did. But as I was walking across the parking lot to get home, he came running out, begging me to stay. I hadn’t realized til that day that the key to dealing with his rages was to call his bluff. Two years later when I graduated from college, he sent me flowers and a note that he was proud of me.

  552. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just good at it*

    Another adventure as a high school teacher in a large urban school district:

    My classroom was on the top (4th) floor of an early 20th century building. My room was also used to hold meetings and seminars. It was a huge room with an auditorium layout.

    A meeting was held Friday afternoon and when I returned to my classroom Monday morning, the windows had been left open all weekend and 50 or more pigeons had taken up residence. First we had to clear them out and then realized what a disastrous mess they left.

    The principal looked at me and said, “I need this room spic and span by Wednesday afternoon.” I looked at him and said, “Good luck.” The maintenance lead said, “Good luck.”

    The boss replied, “I’ll make it worth your while.” I said, “Ain’t enough money in the world,” He smiled and said, “Yes there is.”

    I took the bribe, the maintenance man took the bribe and the superintendent of schools commented on how bright and clean our classroom was to the big shots and press for the meeting.

  553. Squeebird*

    Ooh! Okay, this is definitely not as “out there” as many of the comments, but back in the mid-aughts I worked for a very small book publisher and distributor as an office assistant. It was basically just me and the owner in the office, but he regularly directed me to use different pseudonyms when writing emails to vendors etc., so that it would look like the company was bigger and had more staff. He was very weird in many other harmless ways, but that’s the one thing that felt most bizarre.

  554. Anomalez*

    Back in the mid 90s I was a webmaster at a financial start up and the CEO told me to put a link to the Starr report (for you youngsters, that was a long document with details of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky‘s affair) on the home page to drive traffic! Lots of websites were doing it and she thought it was a brilliant idea. I refused because I thought it was tasteless and felt bad for Monica, but got a talking to by my boss who said that sometimes we had to do things that we didn’t agree with if your boss tells you to. I thought about that for years afterwards and whether he was right.

    1. quill*

      It’s quite gross but I want to know if it actually did anything back in the days before Google SEO, or if people only thought it would?

  555. okaythen*

    I worked for a couple of years at a university-based non-profit, managed by a person who had worked there for many years but had gotten a brain injury about 5 years before. She had very little executive function and absolutely no awareness of time or deadlines, and micromanaged everyone. This caused problems every day with everything, but the one that stands out to me is the time that she was driving herself to another location, where she would have to give a presentation that she hadn’t written yet. She called me up and had me tell her facts I pulled off the internet and wrote the presentation on her laptop as she drove. I protested that I didn’t want to listen to her die in a car accident. I offered to write the presentation myself and send it to her, or just to type it as she directed me to. Nope – she wrote it. She made it alive, but by all accounts the presentation was not good.

    1. Be an Engineer, They Said*

      Did we… work for the Same School Study-help? Because that sounds JUST like an old boss of mine, right down to the brain injury and the poor driving decisions. She was also frequently without a license and just drove anyway.

  556. me*

    I lived in a major metropolitan city and had a professional license.

    I was between jobs and found a part-time office job working basically as an assistant to a guy tangentially in my field, with the understanding that I would learn from him, help with the paperwork, and do things like setting up an office email system. I was hired as an independent contractor rather than an employee because he didn’t want to pay tax. Looking back on the conditions of the employment, this was probably wrong.

    Usually, my work consisted of filling out paperwork, having copies of paperwork made, and doing some research on specific questions. However, there were some things that he’d have me do that were more of the personal assistant nature. For example, I (a woman) spent an hour getting lost walking around a dark underground parking garage with no cell service in winter to find the office that sold parking passes. I only found the office because some city workers found me wandering around, drove me to the office, and then out to the street. I almost quit that day. I’m so happy nothing bad happened to me.

    Fortunately, I found a full-time job so I turned in my two-week notice for my part-time job. On my last day of work, he had me go to his house to move file boxes from the basement to the attic. He left me there while his wife was working from home. Then I went to the office and he wanted me to bring more files from the office down to his car (we were on the 4th floor and the elevator didn’t work), drive his car across the city and bring the boxes down to his basement. This would have taken at least two trips to get the files to his house. Also, it was winter so there was still snow and slush on the sidewalks and in the streets so I had 0 confidence in my driving abilities in this weather and especially not when driving someone else’s car. I did have a driver’s license, but never drove in the city, much less in the snow.

    I said no, asked for my last check, which I promptly cashed, and went to the liquor store.

    I’m not saying that I was above doing these tasks, but they did put me in different unsafe situations and were outside the scope of the work that I had been hired to do. Also, there were absolutely courier services that could have done the box-moving more quickly and more safely than I could have done – and probably not much more expensively than he was paying me for the day. Given that I was classified as an independent contractor, who knows what would have happened if I had actually injured myself.

  557. DataQueen*

    I just came here to say that the boss who wanted the postal route changed isn’t that nuts. It’s worth it to ask! In both NYC and Boston, I’ve worked with the post offices to get our delivery and pickup times changed, always get extra bins, get better postage rates, and recently I even got them to make us up a new address! Always worth asking! Be nice to your postman, and walk down to the station and get to know your bulk mail processer. It’s usually just one person who really loves visitors :)

  558. Anon for this*

    Many years ago the senior manager was too much of a workaholic to buy a gift for his wife, and as the only woman in the division he asked me to buy it for him. He seemed to think that he was generous by offering me a big favor in exchange, without realizing that it felt very demeaning to ask a female coder in a male-dominated workplace to do something so stereotypical, and even more so when I clearly dressed and behaved more masculine and had never shown any interest in shopping. When I gave him the gift he asked if I had a favor yet, and I stared and calmly responded responded “Only that you never, ever ask me for this type of thing ever again”, and he looked a bit distressed as though he realized that it probably wasn’t a good idea in hindsight, and thankfully seemed to grow from it as he treated me more equally after that.

  559. Be an Engineer, They Said*

    Move three states away, on two days notice, indefinitely, with undefined housing support, to do a different job with different duties which were unclear to me and would not be enumerated until I got there, with no pay change despite vastly different cost of living (and that Id be paying two rents because I couldnt get out of my lease, and remember, undefined length of stay!). I raised the issue of my chronic health problems and that I had doctors at home I was committed to seeing and it would be difficult for me to transfer care on such short notice. I was directed to simply. Drive back for my all my medical needs???? But they wouldn’t pay for that, of course. That was obviously just one of my problems with this. They couldnt even confirm if I could take my cat with me! I told them no. They told me that was the wrong answer and to come back in the morning with a different one. So I came back and quit.

  560. Jay*

    I’ve worked a lot of strange jobs over the years and had a lot of strange situations come up. I’ve written about a few of them here. For reference, in my current position I have been accidentally hit in the face with a thrown shark. This is not unusual. I have filled out Workers Comp claims for this. More than once.
    No, for this next one we go back close to 30 years, to the job I worked at my senior year in highschool and all through college.
    This was a folksy type country bakery with the type of folksy country owner who gave both folksy and country bad names. He was a religious zealot and an everything-ist. He used the first to justify and excuse the second. His treatment of anyone even remotely female was beyond abhorrent (he never had any problems with his P.O.C. employees, as he never hired any), his compliance with health and safety codes was non existent, and his adherence to employment laws extended only so far as the parts were he was ‘allowed’ to abuse his employees.
    He got away with it all, basically indefinitely, because of our part of the Rural South’s lionization of business owners. A person ‘obviously’ only got to be the ‘boss’ because they were just BETTER than all the non-bosses.
    He was also a long standing member of a ‘church’ that functioned as our local small town Illuminati. You would not just be bringing a complaint against someone who probably made a lot of people very, very sick, among many other things, no, you were calling into QUESTION the CHARACTER of an ELDER of the CHURCH! And that was simply not done.
    The sheriff, health inspector, fire marshal, and most senior judge (not to mention a gaggle of other local business leaders and government officials), Elders of the Church all, would of course never hear of such a thing. It was an insult to them all.
    I learned so many lessons from this man.
    All of them very, very bad.
    It took me years to recover, to learn that I had literal value as a human being despite my horrific lifestyle choices (I had not been born into money, was neither a boss nor an owner, and I had the incredibly poor judgement to only allow myself to grow to 5’5″ tall as a male) and I still find some of them hard to shake.
    But one particular incident stands out.
    We had a clogged toilet.
    Not unusual in and of itself.
    I was asked to stop filling doughnuts and pastries and go unclog it.
    No, of COURSE I would not be wearing gloves. The owner is not made of gloves. Yes the only soap available is the tiny sliver of elderly hand soap sitting in a pool of fetid water at the bottom of the sink. No, I may not get more soap, the owner is also not made of soap.
    So I plunge the toilet.
    And what do I find?
    Apparently some maniac has tried to flush a dough knife/scrapper.
    I walk out and casually toss the Toilet Knife into the trash. It has been in the toilet. It is a Toilet Knife now, not a dough knife and really should not be used as one. Even at 19 years old, I know this.
    He sees me do it and throws a fit.
    Apparently he is also not made of dough knives.
    He orders me to take it to the sink and wash it with the discount, watered down dish soap we use. Which we then, of course, watered down even further, to the point where it was slightly soap-colored tap water.
    “Fortunately” at this point our lone (young, definitely teenage, almost certainly under 18) female employee comes into work. His standard practice for this event is to go to great lengths to look down her shirt whenever she is facing him and to mime grabbing her butt whenever she is facing away from him.
    So, while he is ‘busy’ being horrible, I drop the Toilet Knife behind the sink and grab one waiting to be cleaned and make a huge show cleaning it off VERY thoroughly.
    Fortunately he is fooled and all’s well that ends well.
    Well, slightly less evil, anyway.
    We didn’t have a plague at any rate.
    That I know of.
    Or at least that was my fault.

  561. Katherine*

    I worked at a small nonprofit as a manager and lived near the office. Because it’s relevant, I had terrible internet at home at that time. My executive director was also the founder. She worked very few hours and traveled quite often for pleasure. During one of her many trips, she left a comment on one of my Facebook posts that contained a very simple typo that did not change the meaning of the comment. She somehow couldn’t edit it, so she called me at 11pm and asked me to get dressed and go into the office so I could log into her work computer where her Facebook password was saved and fix the typo.

    I did not. I deleted the comment and a few days later, removed all work contacts from my personal social media.

  562. Elm*

    Teach an additional class without pay.

    The district legitimately thought none of us would read our contracts and see “no teacher shall teach more than five classes without written agreement and a stipend of X. No teacher shall, under any circumstances, teach more than six classes.”

    Not only were they demanding every single teacher take on an additional class without pay, but that included those who were already teaching six classes.

    The parental outcry actually had no effect this time. It was replacing a much-needed study hall/teacher support period. They spent the money before doing a temperature check.

    The program was canceled one week before it was supposed to begin after the union stepped in. (Unfortunately, the money had been spent, and it wasn’t an insubstantial amount from the fund used to buy crazy things like new books.)

    To this day, they have no idea who alerted the union. *Nonchalantly whistles and walks away*

  563. MyGoingConcern*

    As a nanny in my early twenties I cared for two preschoolers for 40-45 hours a week and coordinated babysitters to cover an additional 10 hours of evenings & weekend care. The mom left town suddenly when her own father became critically ill and was expected to pass within the week. After a few days her husband told me outright to call and tell her that she needed to “stop being selfish and come home instead of abandoning her children to go sit uselessly and watch a man die.” And yes, this conversation happened in front of the kids.

    A few years later I was deposed in the custody battle that ensued after their inevitable divorce.

  564. judyjudyjudy*

    My PhD supervisor asked me if I was willing to move my dissertation defense so she could go to a pilates class. And after all that professor wrangling, to get my whole committee in a room together!

    1. Wolf*

      What is it with PhD defenses? You’d think they’re kind of a big deal, but half of my (8 people) research group skipped mine for reasons like “I always play with my cats on Wednesday afternoons”.

  565. just a random teacher*

    While working at a school that had, shall we say, an exciting variety of organizational challenges, I got a phone call from the principal one day asking if I could get up on stage and lead the school in “Lift Every Voice and Sing” on piano in an all school assembly later that day. I should note here that I did not teach music, and am not licensed to do so in my state. (Even if I did teach music for a living, “lead the entire school in singing something by playing the piano onstage” feels like something that should have at least 24 hours turn-around time, ideally more, but I suppose I could be wrong about that.) I was curious if they were planning to provide sheet music so I could sightread during the assembly or if they just thought being able to play Lift Every Voice and Sing from memory on the piano during school assemblies came free with every vaguely musically inclined teacher, but since the answer was no regardless I did not actually ask.

    Given that we had a music teacher, I assume they asked him first and he said no before they called me. I am curious how many teachers they asked before giving up. (No piano was played at the all school assembly that day.)

    For the record, I am white, so this wasn’t a racism thing, just an incredible lack of forethought and general grasping at straws for any teacher who might secretly be able to pull this off at the last minute.

  566. Dragonfly7*

    I wasn’t allowed to tell the home office that I didn’t know where my manager was. If they asked about her when she wasn’t on site, I was to say she was out doing a marketing meeting with a potential customer. It wasn’t unusual to go over a week without seeing or hearing from her.
    Sadly, even though I technically ran the business in her absence, this meant the home office still referred to me as “the receptionist.” (My actual title was Customer Care Representative.)

  567. I was saying Boo-urns*

    First professional job: being told to drive a very expensive car around the block and park it again so that the owner, one of the managers, wouldn’t get a fine. Then it became his clients’ cars. Then another manager’s car. All while being expected to handle the office phone (connected to my cellphone) and the reception area so to leave any clients or other visitors waiting.

    It went on for one summer before it was shut down from the top, and reception had to send out an office-wide email with ”Reception is not a parking service”.

  568. IDoActuallyWorkHere*

    When I was in my mid-twenties, early-on in my career, the VP of my division had a tendency to hire young people for my department that he met during his time in local bars, regardless of their education or experience. He seemed to think that anyone could do our job with just a little training, which isn’t generally true, and most of these people quit thereafter, or stayed but. couldn’t escape the lay offs over the next couple of years. Anyway, one time, he asked if I would talk to one of these “friends” of his if he brought her in, and basically try to convince her to come work for our company. So he brings her in, and it’s quite clear that she doesn’t want to be there, but I start telling her about our team and work. VP mentions how I was able to jump right in when I started and just pick things up as I went. It was clear that he either forgot about my background or never knew about it to begin with, and since I was done trying to convince this girl of working here, I said something to the effect of “Actually, I have a Bachelors of Science in Information Sciences & Technology, and spent 3 years of my college days working in our niche industry. But I’m sure you’ll be able to just “pick it up as you go”.” VP wrapped it up pretty quickly, and she never came to work there.

  569. Pugs'n'Nugs*

    I used to work as a Dispatch Operator, where Id assign drivers to drop off and bring back airline crew to their respective hotels.

    The boss was an ignorant man who would not only ‘forget’ to pay his staff (this happened more than once), he also brought his new young wife to the office, have her upstairs to do the accounting, and then leave the poor girl up there whilst he drove off to meetings. Keep in mind that this young woman had no means to drive and had also arrived here with little English.
    For some strange reason he had driven home, which 24 kilometres from where the office was, and left his wife behind. I sincerely believed he forgot about her whilst he went on another one of his errands.

    So he rang me up and asked me, to ask one of our drivers, to drive his wife to his home. However, the drivers that night were flat out busy taking passengers to and from the airport and there would not be anyone coming back to the depot until well past midnight…which would have been much too late.
    I dont remember who drove her home in the end. But that was one of many sketchy and crazy things that happened that caused myself and half the drivers to leave in the end (I was told no driver stayed for more than 6 months).

    1. Pugs'n'Nugs*

      Oh, and he once had a violent brawl with his business partner/former best friend right in front of the office over a business dispute.
      He did not pay his drivers properly and ended up having one of them threatening to ring a motorcycle gang to set fire to the office.
      Bought the cheapest mini buses which would of course break down over and over again, then blame his mechanic for not being able to fix them.

  570. Not Australian*

    Mild compared to others’ experiences but I was ordered to photocopy play texts for an AmDram production and I knew that was a copyright violation so I refused to do it. In fact, as my boss was a lawyer, I initially thought he was involved in a copyright case concerning the text so I made several copies of the copyright information instead. He just thought I was stupid. I couldn’t believe that a *lawyer* was essentially asking me to do something illegal.

    Years later, long after smoking in offices had been banned completely in my country, I was obliged to sit in an office with a woman who chain-smoked. As I knew I was only going to be there a few months and the money was good I actually agreed to it, but yet again this was a respected legal office. It was also – at a different firm – a lawyer who tried to stiff me my last month’s wages and had to be taken to court and sued to get him to pay up.

    IME, the profession that is absolutely the worst at tromping all over the law is the legal profession itself.

  571. Defs anon*

    I worked for a highly dysfunctional small business that was operating out of a house. The business owner decided to go on a 6 month vacation and figured why not make some extra money while gone and rent out the unused bedrooms in the house? We’d have no problem with that, right?

    Well, the business owner was super sketchy and it became clear that she’d told the tenants and employees different things about the shared arrangement. Although there were nominally 2 separate entries to the house, internally there was no clear delineation between residential space and workspace amenities. So things got tense. Fast.

    The business provided professional services and we often had important clients visit the office. One of the tenants was a tradesman who would traipse through our workspace, filthy, wearing no shirt and lugging tools whenever he felt like it. Another had a dog that she kept locked up all day upstairs above the office portico… so getting a dog urine shower as you walked in or out became a frequent occupational hazard. Then there was the laundry, screened off from our desks with a curtain, that had a washer with a spin cycle so loud it was impossible to hear or speak over. We asked them not to run it during business hours, but then got dagger looks whenever we used the shared kitchen.

    But by far though, the absolute worst thing was the shared bathroom. One tenant would regularly leave her crusted up, filthy underwear strewn about for everyone to enjoy. Then there was the time she got her period and left her USED menstrual pad out, stuck onto the bathroom sink.

  572. Infrequent Commenter*

    I’m late to this so don’t know if anyone will see it, but – a bullying manager once asked me (the IT person) to find and book a restaurant for his wedding anniversary that evening, and made a formal complaint about me when I told him I couldn’t do that. He then ‘generously’ offered to investigate the complaint as the head of department was on leave at the time, and got very irritated when told he couldn’t do that.

  573. Might Be Spam*

    When I was in college I worked at a self service gas station owned by a major oil company. One day I came in and my boss told me that they were closing the location down and that we were all fired. Then she told me to call another employee who wasn’t at work that day and fire them over the phone. They weren’t home and I had to tell their sister to tell them not to come in anymore.

  574. UShoe*

    My former MD was a terminal last-minute merchant, always late or on-time by the skin of his teeth – especially for travel. I got a phone call one morning as he and another director were on their way to catch a flight – and had got stuck in awful traffic. Of course, because it was him, they’d only left enough time for a clear drive to the airport to check-in right before the desk closed.
    So he was ringing me, to ask me to ring the airline’s check-in desk, to ask them to HOLD THE FLIGHT because, and I quote, “everyone else will be stuck in this traffic with us”. This was a budget airline flying from the countries biggest international airport.
    I was very junior and very new so I rang the customer service number and asked to be put through to the check-in desk, got a resounding no. I was advised by my boss that I needed to be “more authoritative” and get problems like this solved.

  575. LondonLady*

    Some years ago, I was working for a small UK-based niche consultancy firm, advising commercial clients on working with ‘heritage assets’ ie old buildings. Some of these buildings are real money pits with little of no prospect of getting permission for any revenue-generating uses without first undertaking costly restoration work. We would advice on grants, good practice etc on restoration and also liaise with regulatory bodies to advise on the necessary permits.

    One notoriously challenging building was taken on by a new client who then came to us for advice. We’d worked with two previous clients who’d had to abandon projects for that site because they could not make the bottom line work.

    Despite the rather gentle culture of the heritage sector, our CEO was all about “winning”. He hated to turn down business but also hated to have failed projects on the books. He directed us to advise the client to consider demolishing the building (without permit) on the basis that paying subsequent legal costs would be the cheapest option to make something of the site. His thinking was that we would be the consultancy that finally got a result there and our client would be a great reference for us.

    In fact, this would have trashed our reputation and our client’s reputation, caused the loss of one of the very heritage assets we were supposed to be in the business of safeguarding, and probably made it impossible for us to work in that city ever again.

    I lost the message to the client in translation, and chose to leave the organisation a few months later, while they continued ‘exploring options’. The building is still standing!

  576. viva*

    I had a newly-hired, senior, male marketing manager – ‘Josh’ – march into my team’s office and demand that I (the woman sitting closest to him, although there were three men closer to him) come out to the main, open office and put together 1,000 flat-pack cardboard cartons, which were to be used to mail out marketing materials.

    The marketing materials that were to be put into those flat-pack cartons were about the edtech app the company was about to launch.

    Josh demanded that I do this carton-folding work at a tall table that was very narrow and not at all appropriate for the work. He also informed me that I would not be allowed to sit down during this work as it “looked like I was slacking off”.

    Josh then said to me, “we really need a photo of the lead developer for this marketing pack. Do you know where I can find him?”

    I said, “Him?”

    Josh snapped, “Yes, the lead developer, Alex. Where is he?”

    I said, “Alex? The lead developer?”

    Josh actually rolled his eyes at me. “Yes, Lead Developer Alex. Where can I find him?”

    I smiled at him and said, “Lead Developer Alex? She’s right in front of you.”

    Josh just stood there for a full five or six seconds with his mouth hanging open.

    And yes, I am a woman, and I was in my mid-30s at the time. I was one of three women on a team of ten.

    1. Trillian Astra*

      this is amazing. please tell me he got canned in 2 seconds! or that he had to put together the flat-packs himself!

  577. Jigglypuff*

    1. I had just moved to the upper midwest from California and was saving up to buy myself a winter coat, boots, gloves, hat, etc. while making do with dashing from my heated car to my heated office. My boss asked me to go shovel the sidewalk in front of our auxiliary building b/c the city’s maintenance staff hadn’t gotten to it yet and she wanted it done. No one used this building and we could have waited for the city to do it, but instead she had me outside with bare hands and tennis shoes while wearing every cardigan I had in my office trying to get this done as fast as possible.

    2. Working at a summer camp in the dining hall, I was told that my crew used too many washcloths to clean things and that we had to each use ONE washcloth all day long and just leave it laying out on a table to dry between meals, that is, until the health inspector was scheduled to show up, at which point all of a sudden we could have as many washcloths as we wanted.

    3. At a public library where the staff area was on the basement level and the public area was on the first floor, the director put in my annual review that I needed to turn and greet her whenever she came down to the staff area, rather than simply replying to her greetings. I was tempted to request that she wear a bell like my cat does so I could know when she was coming.

  578. KatieP*

    This skeevy accountant for a company I temped at back in ’95 asked me to model lingerie for him.
    I didn’t. And I called my temp agency and reported what he did. The owner of the agency was a woman, and I talked to her directly. She never did business with them again.

    Had a boss at a non-profit I worked for who asked me to, “Let me know if you need to come in late because beat you and you have to go get stiched-up. My wife and I went through that phase, and all young couples have to sort that out.” Um, no. Should such an event occur, my next stop will be the police station, not the office. Then-boyfriend/now-husband was furious that anyone even suggest such a thing.

    I always felt bad for his wife.

    I nope’d out of that job quickly and ended-up at a job with a series of great supervisors who inspired the start of my career.

  579. GingerBread*

    I was a junior associate for a small audit firm and we were auditing a farm supply company. Though I was young, I have rheumatoid arthritis and have balance issues and walk with a noticeable limp. My boss asked me to climb a silo in order to estimate how full it was, with no harness or safety equipment. I refused. The only other staff member there was 7 months pregnant. The boss, who was in his 70’s and just as ill-equipped to perform this feat as I was, ended up huffingly doing it himself.

    Same boss once asked me to change the closing date on my house the day before it was scheduled. The reason was because we had a change in our schedule and needed to be onsite at a client that day. My closing was first thing in the morning, and I agreed to come in that day even though I was scheduled off, but he still wanted me to reschedule because since I was going to my closing first, I wouldn’t be able to carpool with the rest of the team and he didn’t want to pay me mileage on my expense report. It was about 40 miles round-trip, so mileage would have cost about $20. I refused and he was flabbergasted.

  580. Ignatius J. Reilly*

    I had a boss who discovered his wife (who also worked for the company) was cheating on him, and asked me to: order a “spy” pen that he could leave in her car to record her conversations; hire a polygraph examiner and book a hotel room for her to go get a lie detector test performed in the middle of the workday; print hundreds of pages of pictures (some NSFW) that she’d texted with this guy; and install tracking software on her phone. The polygraph and tracking software were done with her “cooperation” as part of her “atoning” for her cheating.

    1. Jay*

      Am I alone in thinking that this was their couples’ kink? Including forcing an unwilling employee to ‘participate’?

  581. learningcurve*

    Oh I have a few from my early working days. My first job when I was 17 was at a very shady company owned by a married couple who had a long history of businesses tanking because of their questionable practices. They would simply change the company name every time they ran into trouble. It was one of those annoying companies that call people relentlessly to ask if they had been involved in an accident, would they like to make a claim etc. We were forced to continue hounding people even after they’d made it very clear they didn’t want to be contacted. Once we had to frantically shred official bank documents when bailiffs arrived at the office on the owners orders. The owner also left me caring for her toddler in the office for hours multiple times while she went shopping or for lunch with friends. There’s a long list of bad events from that job. I was eventually fired after being hospitalised with panic attacks due to my treatment there, makes me laugh how naive I was looking back. My job after that was as an Admin Assistant at an elderly care home where I was told not to talk to the residents as it wasn’t part of my job description and I was wasting time. Do I ignore the lonely old folks then? The manager at that job was eventually fired for embezzling money, thankfully I had left by then. Also thankfully had better luck with workplaces since then (only just!)

    1. learningcurve*

      More memories:
      Boss at the first job once asked me and another colleague to “get rid” of a man who came for an interview because he was “too fat”.
      Boss at the second job once made me go purchase nail polish remover on my lunch break because she thought my short painted nails made me look “like a prostitute”.

  582. Double Shelix*

    This just happened, not to me, but to my coworker! I have been wanting to share it with Alison but it’s not a question, just a situation that galls us all.

    Background: a couple months ago, i (M.S. in my field, ~20 years experience now, 9 years with this company) joined a different group in a different business unit that is more profitable and has much higher stakes. I was given a hefty promotion, and my pay went up 50 % partially because API unit pays more but also because of the promotion. I truly, honestly believe my experience thoroughly justifies this promotion. The pay is nice, but i didn’t leave for money, i left for job satisfaction, because i’d never been promoted, and because i am not a fan of the director of Old Department, among other reasons. Old Director is openly vocal about not liking me, and let the transfer go through without a word, so i guess we’re even.

    Coworker, who has a PhD and 2 years experience all at our company, from my same Old Department was offered a job in my new group after the same formal interview process i went through. She started about a month after me, at her same title as in Old Department with a healthy pay increase as well – hypothetically $X = new salary. Side info of semi-relevance: I found out recently that she only got a raise to be within the range of her current title after asking (we’ll call her current salary after asking to be $0.8X). Her original pay was LOWER THAN MINE ($0.6X) even though she was TWO titles above me and has a PhD while i have an MS. So my old title was Scientist II, she was basically Scientist IV, but being paid less. That alone is total BS but, wait for it:

    Three days before she was set to start, Old Director (who likes her) called her into a Zoom meeting with HR to inform her that not only was her offer for Scientist IV being reduced to Scientist III in the new group, but her offer salary was being lowered to reflect “what you’re worth” due to her lack of experience – about $0.9X. They essentially took back her offer, 3 business days before she’s supposed to start. Their counteroffer is to stay in Old Department at her current title, but with the increased $0.9X salary. Our new boss was present in this meeting, and told us later that he didn’t know what the meeting was about, was just invited to join. He is mortified at what went down.

    We all found out later that in a 20 ish person meeting in our old department he had announced, “[New Unit] is off their rocker if they think they can make an offer like that to someone like Coworker. I am doing what i can to rectify this badly mishandled situation.” What??

    The above does not affect me except: She’s furious and mortified, rightly so, and we both have to work with Old Director because his group’s projects come into our group when they transition from development into production. So, really, i don’t know who to trust, and neither does Coworker. My ability to be civil to Old Director is….LOW.

    The entire situation is just baffling and horrifying to us.

  583. Lara*

    One of my best friends was a librarian at a small college. She found a leak that was directly over a shelf of old records and textbooks that led to the books being infested with mold. Once she finally convinced the college to get the leak fixed (not just temp-patched, 100% fixed), she was told it was her responsibility to clean and mend the damaged books. She would be required to spend two extra hours per day (on top of all her other duties) in a barely-ventilated trailer on the edge of campus, cleaning toxic black mold off old books with equally-toxic chemicals. She refused, and sent her higher-ups lists of information and warnings that all said basically “this type of mold should be handled by professionals, specifically professionals who have also been trailed in working with chemicals”. She was fired for “not being a team player and rising to a challenge”.

    While it was not unreasonable in a technical sense, I am still bitter over a decade later that, after a customer tore into me, my manager gave me five minutes in the break room to “pull myself together” and a pep talk about not letting a little rudeness make me less attentive towards other customers. I was called any number of obscene names and told me and my entire family should die of cancer and rot in hell, for the heinous crime of not letting someone tear a coupon out of a newspaper they had not purchased, but sure, five minutes with the communal box of tissues in the break room makes up for that.

  584. RagingADHD*

    I worked as a legal secretary for many years. Lawyers bend a LOT of rules in the name of “serving the clients’ interests,” when often it’s more a matter of serving their own or the client’s convenience (or helping the client do really illegal stuff.) And generally speaking, staff in the legal office are covered by attorney-client privilege, since nobody expects attorneys to do their own typing.

    I think the worst one that I was asked to directly participate in, was a marital separation agreement where the wife knew a lot more about her husband’s income than the IRS did. My boss had me draw up the boilerplate agreement for spousal support based on the tax returns that would be filed with the court.

    Thing is, the husband also had a significant income in cash under the table. Extremely large quantities of cash. His declared income allowed them to afford very large, beautiful homes in town and out in the country with an extravagant lifestyle. His cash income was bigger. His declared income came from the construction trades and waste management. So I drew a few conclusions as to where his cash income came from, based on the tone of my boss’s voice and the look on his face when he mentioned it. (He was actually a very mild-mannered guy who did family law because he wanted to make peace. He was visibly squeamish about this situation).

    Then my boss asked me to draw up the “Addendum” to the spousal support agreement. I asked him, “you mean the addendum that the client attests in the original agreement, under penalty of perjury, does not exist?”

    Yup, that one. The one that granted the wife a share of his cash income, so she wouldn’t rat him out to the Feds. I have no idea if the ratting out would ONLY be about the cash, or if there was more to tell. I don’t want to know.

    I noped out of that one so hard. I told my boss, “I’m leaving the blank templates open on my computer and going home. If the government ever comes looking for that guy, I don’t want to wind up in Witness Protection.”

    I hope the wife had some really good insurance.

  585. IndustriousLabRat*

    First job out of University…. My first day of work at a new location of Insane Job, the boss asked me if I knew how to sew, with no context. I said, “um, yeah”, and though nothing more of it.

    I was later asked to give stitches to a guy I worked with who had torn the meat of his thumb open on a large fish hook.

    Yes, I was the only woman there. Yes, this was a fishing vessel. We were about 2 days from the nearest port (St. Paul Island, AK). Yes, the guy got stitched up. The captain showed me how to do it properly and whined that “he just wasn’t very good at sewing”. Like, a guy who had been doing this for 40+ years picks the 22 year old kid because, GIRL! Girls are born knowing how to sew! Let’s have her learn a skill reserved for freaking MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS on a live subject! But one does NOT say no to the Captain. Especially this one.

    Same boat, I was also asked to give someone a haircut, and instead suggested they just wear a hat til we got back to Dutch. I had the sense the request had nothing to do with his hair and everything to do with the fact that he was a skeezball. Luckily, the requestor was not an officer of the ship, and could be safely turned down.

  586. Xarcady*

    Unclog a toilet.

    Small, family-owned business that rented an office building in an office park. Routine maintenance like this was the responsibility of the tenant.

    Clog happened during a client visit and the bathroom flooded. I waded in (wearing my snow boots) and shut the water off. Attempted to use the plunger, but it didn’t work.

    The owner, alerted by the unusual amount of activity in the hallway, left the meeting and told me to go buy a plumber’s snake and unclog it.

    I refused, and pointed out that the toilet had clogged up four times in the past month, and that perhaps it was time for a professional to look at it. There was in fact a broken part in the toilet tank that preventing enough water getting into the bowl, which was causing the clogs.

    For the remainder of the client visit, which was only an hour or two, we took the men’s room sign down and made it a unisex one-stall bathroom.

  587. quill*

    Soo late, but it’s a tie from Worst Job between

    – Spent 2+ weeks trying to persuade big chemical manufacturers to give us free samples of nitrocellulose… which is an explosive. Nobody was eager to give a no-name basement laboratory free explosives.

    – The job involved, to put it mildly, very gross aspects of preparing biosamples. Which, to be clear, I had signed up for. What I had not signed up for was to get up at dawn, drive 2 hours out and back to a “local” butcher to get pig extras, and spend the next 9 hours at a lab bench processing them into scientific bits, while the boss’ idea of rewarding us for this was to buy us a bacon pizza, then hide in his office as soon as the sink broke and flooded the lab floor with further detritus of pig. We had to bleach every inch of the lab, and even raw, pork has… a smell.

    I have never eaten a pork chop since.

    Runner up:
    – Based on the single time I managed to make my computer not be filled with a virus, I became IT person at that same company. This involved things such as picking melted labels out of the printer and being called in to “fix” the time someone ‘hacked’ our site and flooded it with graphic videos… The boss argued about whether he needed to change his passwords after that.

    But the crowning achievement was that over a year later, I spent two months getting quotes for an updated website from seven different companies, trying to build in all the features he suggested without making an alarming frankenstein build, doing deep research into wordpress after the boss dismissed several “build your own business website” services (see, squarespace) because he wouldn’t own the domain, and after three weeks of sitting on the seven quotes, told me we wouldn’t use any of them because squarespace was cheaper.

    “Someone in India will build it for even less than squarespace,” he told me, which is presumably how he got his first crappy website that “got hacked by ISIS.”

  588. Jeremy Bearimy*

    I work for an accountant who is unfortunately scared of technology and wants to do everything the same way he did it 30 years ago because “it’s been working fine all this time”. He only updated to the new version of QuickBooks Desktop every few years. Not completely unreasonable or uncommon, but… he also refused to let us accept those occasional QuickBooks security updates because the next time we let the software update, it was when QuickBooks began requiring that you use a password for each company. My boss hated having to keep track of passwords. I did explain a few times that we were missing out on actual security features that would protect our data, and that we definitely should use a password, but never won that debate because “let’s just keep doing it my way because that’s what I’m comfortable with”.

    So for a year or so I hit the ignore button on those pop-ups whenever I opened QuickBooks. One day I accidentally accepted the update. Note that we did not get upgraded to the latest release of the software; we would have had to pay for that and some things would be different. All this meant was that we just got some updates to prevent bugs, etc., and also now were required to use a password. For software that includes SSNs and bank account info! Totally reasonable! I created a password similar to our others that should have no difficulty remembering, updated all the data entry I was going to do that day (a month’s worth for two companies), and then let my boss know via email that I accidentally updated it and we now have a password.

    WELL! He demanded that I uninstall the software on each of our computers, re-install the original file of it so the password requirement would not be there, re-populate the data from the most recent backup *that did not include the month of data I had entered that day, since that backup was for a newer version and now password protected*, and then enter the month’s worth of data all over again.

    It took me the whole next day to actually do this and catch us back up just so we could avoid password protecting info that we absolutely should have been password protecting for a little longer. I protested at first and I hated every minute of doing something so useless with my time, but I did it because I got paid really well, and by the hour.

  589. Red*

    In no particular order of insanity:
    *Cut out the middle of Uline catalogs so we could smuggle product into the Middle East.
    *Go to Walgreens and buy 7 bottles of mineral oil and ship it to some dude in Greece because it would ‘smooth the deal’.
    *Contact a dude in East Africa who had stolen our product and find out his location so we could smuggle our product out of Africa and back to Europe. We’re in America. I managed to find the guy and we managed to get the product back to Europe.
    *Call a man in Greece to see if he would be willing to ‘help us out’. I got his wife(?) and she (I can only assume) cussed out myself and my boss and then passed the phone to her husband who proceeded to explain in English how much we suck and then agreed to ‘help us out’.
    *Not my management, but we had a customer who when we told him we couldn’t get a permit for his product asked ‘why we don’t just take the customs agents to dinner?’

    I know there’s way more but this is off the top of my head.

    1. IndustriousLabRat*

      “*Cut out the middle of Uline catalogs so we could smuggle product into the Middle East.”

      CLASSIC. These days, the Grainger catalog would be a fine choice :) As an aside… why do either of them even still send paper catalogs to businesses? It’s 2021… There is such a thing as the Internet…

      1. Red*

        I have no idea! The Uline catalogs were actually a hilarious joke because we would get one for like every employee and some employees would receive them at home too and no one knows how they got their home address, but they did. So we had PLENTY of Uline carry-ons for the middle east salesperson.

        Quite frankly, that job was the most fun I’ve ever had at a job, but omg the general business motto seemed to be “Screw the Rules, I have Money!” or, alternatively, “Laws? What are these la-aws you speak of?”

    2. quill*

      Uh, what the entire duck? I guess you don’t want to provide more details about your industry for understandable reasons but WHAT INDUSTRY IS THIS because it’s insane.

      1. Red*

        Agricultural Research.
        I learned so much about dodging customs and smuggling lol. The less industrialized the nation the more fast and loose they play the rules. So, while getting something in or out of Europe requires careful planning and arrangement of docs, getting something in or out of say sub-Saharan Africa is infinitely easier because it’s less about is the product properly documented and more who you know.
        Total aside: one of my wildest shipping moments was trying to get something into Libya and the air broker was just like
        BROKER: ‘we’ll have to fly cairo and truck it over’
        US: ‘why?’
        BROKER: ‘the airport is gone’
        US: ‘gone?’
        BROKER: ‘yeah’
        The airport was completely gone. It had been bombed.

  590. Trisha*

    As a 24 year old receptionist for a chemical company, one of my responsibilities was to go to the bar which was a few doors down from us and collect the drunk salesmen in the afternoon. They would often go down at lunch time and by 3pm the President would come looking for them (there 4-5 salesmen in total – usually 2 of them were down at the bar). He would tell me to go get them. The first time he sent me with the office manager so she could show me where they sat and how to get them to come back to the office. The office manager would have a drink with them and then get them to return to the office. The former receptionist who was promoted to another office position would often try to tag along with me so that they would buy her a drink and she had no issue having a few in the afternoon. I thought this was just so….I believe the AAM phrase is “bananapants”. I would never accept the drink and just tell them “Rod sent me down here to get you; either come back now or I will tell him you refused.” No discussion, no cajoling….I would just turn and walk away. Too many alcoholics in my extended family for me to put up with the ramblings of a couple of drunk salesmen. They learned quick that I wasn’t putting up with any BS and as soon as I’d appear in the doorway, they’d throw back their last drink and settle their tab. Thankfully it got to the point that I didn’t have to do much more than just open the bar door and say “Time to go.” Still one of the most awkward tasks I’ve ever had to do.

  591. I just work here*

    Write a character reference for a location manager to use as evidence in his DV case & pending divorce. Because it’s not a conflict of interest, clearly. I didn’t have to do it if it made me uncomfortable. Right. Shaking my damn head.

  592. The burninator*

    I worked for a dentist, and one day (in February, in Wisconsin!) he was informed that the heat would be out the following day so that a new Furnace could be installed. Instead of cancelling patients, I was told to wear long underwear under my scrubs.
    When I arrived the office was freezing. He had purchased multiple space heaters he wanted me to unpack and place around the office. He stressed that I needed to keep all packaging materials so that the next day I could repackage them so he could return them to the store.

  593. pamcakes*

    I’m a doctor, as was my boss. The office had a basement level with very steep, narrow, uneven stairs leading down to it. There were exam rooms down there, but no bathroom or anything else that one might need. If you worked down there, you were going up and down those stairs multiple times a day.

    I was scheduled to work in the basement one day when I had a broken foot. I had a huge, orthopedic walking boot on my foot that was longer and wider than the stairs and crutches. It was challenging to walk up and down normal stairs. These ones seemed like a terrible idea. I asked my boss if she could work downstairs and I could take her slot upstairs. She asked me why. I reminded her of the boot that had been on my foot for a few weeks at that point and said it would be challenging to get up and down those stairs; I was afraid of falling. She told me that the stairs were fine and I needed to work down there as scheduled. I should have flat out refused, but I was so stunned and already had multiple patients waiting so I hobbled down those stairs. The other employees couldn’t believe she made me do that and got me everything I needed from upstairs all day. I still had to go up to use the bathroom, though. Luckily, I didn’t injure myself any further.

  594. Youth*

    Pretend to be my boss’s boss on a phone call.
    It was for a benign purpose, but I felt uncomfortable being pressured by my boss to lie to a client regardless of the reasons. I took it to the head of our division, and she made it clear he wasn’t to do that anymore.
    Despite multiple issues with his work (I was essentially doing both our jobs most of the time) and many documented things that he did that made me uncomfortable, he was promoted many times.

  595. LawLady*

    When I was a young associate at a law firm, a partner is a different practice area broke her arm. One morning, my office phone rings about 7:15 and it was the partner with the broken arm, asking me to come to her office and help her fix her hair up in a clip because her arm was broken and she couldn’t do it herself but she had seen me wear my hair up that way. The kicker was she didn’t like how I was doing it and made me redo it 3 times! I let her calls go to voicemail after that.

  596. Jane Austin's Tea Cozy*

    Not sure how unreasonable this is, really, but it struck me as odd at the time. I worked as an office/social media/HR manager for a small game studio (I know). My background is in journalism but it was a job, so whatever. Somehow, the CFO got it into his head that I could just do the misc things that popped up. That included, at first, filling out discovery lists for a sale, writing IP contracts for the employees, negotiating that same IP contract, and walking the owners dog.

    Then it included getting an H1B for a new employee.

    Neither party hired a lawyer; they just expected me to do it. I did suggest perhaps a lawyer would be a better option, but whatever, they insisted and I was tired of writing release notes anyway. Somehow I actually managed to get the visa for the guy, who turned out to be a douche anyway. As far as I know he still works there. I…. Do not.

  597. Ixora*

    When I was in college, I took a part time job as an office assistant for a realtor couple who worked out of an office attached to their home. As time went on, they started using me more and more for household chores. One day they asked me to sweep their kitchen and I found a trail of maggots leading from the rubbish across the room to the dog food bowl. I cleaned it up but found a new job soon after. When I quit, they threw a fit and yelled at me about loyalty and how much they’d done for me. Good riddance.

  598. Formerklinicmanager*

    Oh I have two. Not sketchy but just craptacular.

    We had 49 active therapists and a team of 5 front desk people and a cal center of three handling in bound calls and call outs to patients. The front desk would help with call outs, but they would handle the six medical providers we had.

    The ceo of the company after verbally abusing me and other members of the staff, insisted that our team of essentially eight also helped call patients for the 49 therapists.. who kept their own schedules anyway.

    When I said we didn’t have the manpower, the ceo cut me down in front of my peers, and wanted me to convert my MAs, already seeing triple booked telemed patients, to phone reps.

    Then my boss told me to allow the ceo to continue to verbally abuse me because it would thicken my skin. I quit two days after.

  599. KatieP*

    Ooh, I forgot this one!

    After about eight years working in Accounts Payable, the print shop I worked in had to downsize. I was assigned to take over the bulk mail printer and packager because, “Accounts Payable uses a computer, the Buskro uses a computer, therefore, the Accounts Payable person knows how to operate the Buskro.”
    I did it because the benefits were good, I needed my paycheck, and it was something different.

  600. Maya*

    So, this was a customer and not a boss, but when I was working in retail I had a customer ask me where to find these elastic half belt things that you clip on to the back of your pants. When I showed her, she took one, opened the package, and turned around and told me to put it on her pants! I was so shocked I just went along with it. She did take the package up front and pay for it, to her credit.

  601. None*

    Most unreasonable thing was getting my job threatened if I did not call out of my retail job on the Saturday before Christmas. Because my office job had planned a spur of the moment Christmas party that day for everyone’s kids to see Santa. They wanted me to run the party, no pay of course because “it was for a party not work.” I had kept my college retail job to supplement income and benefits because I made less at the office with no benefits. It was just to build my resume right out of college.

    The office job didn’t realize they were the second job. They thought just being a office job made them better than retail.

  602. Miller-Admin*

    I work in higher education. My former department chair told me that I was supposed to go to the Division of Motor Vehicles and pick up her handicap decal.

    She was bad about attempting to use admins and graduate students as personnel assistants. Kept getting her hand slapped, would get for a semester or two and the problem would prop back up. I really wish that they were evaluated on their work relationships with employees, co-workers, other departments of campus. Interpersonal skills should be graded a different way. Once they get tenure they can behave badly; get caught; stop for a period of time; than return back to it. They get worse when we are on a hiring / raise freeze. No incentive to behave.

  603. Ye Olde New Englander*

    Many years ago, in the mid- to late-80s I was in my 20s and an admin in an office suite that rented out individual offices and provided admin support services. I came in one morning and was walking around the offices and halls to make sure all was in order and came across a large, fresh and still-wet, blood stain on the floor. I checked the bathrooms, as usual, and in the men’s bathroom also found blood stains and a tooth on the counter. I reported this to my boss. Apparently one of our tenants–an older, really sweet guy–had a known pattern of going out to clubs, bringing young hustlers back to the office for sex, and getting mugged and robbed. It had happened a few times before. My boss made me clean up the blood stains which it never occurred to me to refuse to do. Remember–this was in the early day of AIDS and wide-spread fear of contact with blood. I wasn’t given any gloves or other precautions. I heard a few years later than the nice tenant died of AIDS. I was unscathed.

    1. Ye Olde New Englander*

      I mean, I was never infected with AIDS. I felt really bad for the tenant and pissed at the boss. I didn’t mean to sound so cold and indifferent!

  604. Rose*

    My first “real job” was a lab assistant for an analytical chemistry lab. It was definitely entry level: I washed glassware, filled solvent jugs, made sure a couple machines were operating within parameters, and did inventory and ordering. At the time I had a year of community college biology under my belt.

    The lab had a microwave processor that went unused because one time it vented mid-sample. No one was injured, but the heat and force could have seriously hurt anyone who might have been standing in front of it. A few months into the job, my boss asked me to design a blast shield so that they could resume using the processor. I did some preliminary research and was overwhelmed by the materials options alone. Figuring there was no way my boss seriously expected me to design this, I left it alone.

    Months later he asked if I had made any progress! (I know now that I should have been clear about this being something I was not equipped to help with, but I really thought that was obvious.) Apparently he had asked my predecessor to do the same and she had come up with some sort of design, but that wasn’t provided to me as a jumping-off point. I looked into the microwave manufacturer and found the venting was normal and for that reason they suggest 18″ of clearance from the top and front. Not good enough for my boss; he insisted that I continue with the blast shield project.

    I’m still flabbergasted thinking of it. Would you trust a safety shield designed by a 20-year-old who hadn’t taken so much as a semester of physics? I was honestly relieved when I was quietly fired at the 11-month mark of my tenure there.

  605. Michele*

    My former boss once demanded that a new hire change her first name at work – because she had the same first name as my boss. We all thought she was joking, of course, since my boss was an SVP with significant power in the company. But, no. She was completely serious, saying, “No one else can have the same name as me.”

  606. Extremely Anon*

    Coming in late so say that a former boss wanted to use my personal WhatsApp account, on my personal phone, to send a “work-related, I promise” message to a woman because he didn’t want his wife to know he was communicating with her.

    Fortunately I didn’t even have to say no, he could see from my face that I was uncomfortable and backed down. Which is why he was one of the better people I worked with there…

  607. Vesuvius*

    I have a few really wild ones that sort of overlap with how godawful my last job was.

    1) Make regular purchase orders for a site despite being told I had to send the info to the PM. This was Cersei’s job, not mine, but she made it mine. This included not being allowed to use paper to keep track while I worked, constantly listening to Cersei whine about how expensive it was, and generally being ignored when I pointed out her cost-saving wasn’t cost-saving. I was being asked to compare replacement parts for a system I had only just learned to operate inside of 5 months. Why? The subcontractors lied to her.

    2) Bring a whistle for safety to a job site, instead of firing the verbally abusive, angry subcontractor, who regularly threatened to beat the s$%t out of homeless people (and locals, and anyone who wasn’t…you know, a Trumper; oh, and, he was also violently racist). That was (not) fun. This guy was a real piece of work. I was genuinely afraid he’d beat me up several times over me forcing him to wear a mask. He was also deaf in one ear and used this as an excuse to yell abuse at me for all sorts of random garbage. It took a manager noticing that he was regularly threatening us for him to be removed. Not, you know, me saying that “Greg has been threatening me, how do I get him to stop” constantly to Cersei.
    Bonus: Cersei expected me to threaten him right back. The whistle was a stopgap measure to shut him up. I now own a whistle that will blow at 115 decibels. This was expensed and approved because Greg was cheaper than replacing him.

    3) Ignore the explosions, it was just a firecracker — also at this lovely, lovely helljob. Given to me by a different manager, Margaery, who to her credit wasn’t as terrible as Cersei, just ambitious. She ignored what might’ve been a bomb going off less than one block away. It was not a bomb, necessarily, but it sure as hell wasn’t on the sidewalk. Someone blew something up indoors and blew the windows out. It might’ve been a meth lab.

    4) Work on-site after dark in a neighborhood with a HIGH CRIME RATE and which had been one of the most dangerous neighborhoods to be in after dark. Did I mention I witnessed multiple drug deals just outside this site? And that the site itself had so much rusted metal on it I might as well have been consigning myself to tetanus. This site still is not safe at night. My friend and coworker Sam had to stay out until 9pm one day “finishing things” and got reamed out for not purchasing something after the local hardware store closed. She was very lucky she didn’t get mugged.

    5) Investigate a possible fire in a high-explosives zone with a fire extinguisher in the event that I can stop it from spreading, instead of evacuating as I was supposed to. Same site, same Cersei BS. I’m very lucky I didn’t die working out there. You DO NOT ignore safety violations on a site like this…but it’s Cersei, so I’m not surprised. SHE didn’t have to work out there. I am reasonably afraid of fires now.

    6) Work regularly, alone, with a guy who kept dodging the background check and fudging the paperwork, so he could get access to school sites. At the time I thought it was harmless. Looking back…whoa Nelly. I’m so grateful I was in the habit of carrying mace every time I went out alone because of Greg. This man also regularly fudged paperwork and committed timesheet fraud, although I could never prove any of it. I know Cersei did (and likely still does) but as I said, I couldn’t prove it.

    7) Regularly take phone calls from Cersei on the highway because she expected me to be available whenever she wanted, including at 6am. And let her complain at and harass me while I nearly crashed the car. Yeah, I noped out of that pretty quick. I got reamed out for it several times over something she didn’t “want to do past 6pm” and at one point I think I told her “too bad, I’m working until 9 and I do this regularly.” Cersei and Jaime could not wait to get rid of me after I started setting THAT boundary.

    8) On my OWN TIME, schedule a repair appointment for a company truck that was unsafe to drive. Drive it to the repair shop, wait around, and get it done. I said no (I did not have the time, and I had been up for about 20h at that point). I got pressured to say yes. I talked to my boss in confusion, and he rescheduled it for the fleet manager to handle (an older woman who refused to come in at all, even to check cars, and I’m not sure what she did with her time working from home). This meant that that same truck, later, was nearly responsible for me ending up in the hospital because its brakes hadn’t been properly checked. This was way outside the scope of my regular duties and not something I was expected to handle, but as I regularly checked trucks out, it was “my job.”
    Skill get: Stopping a big truck coming off a short highway ramp with malfunctioning brakes!

    Oh, also after I left? I realized a few things. The office is definitely under reporting the amount of money made to pay taxes (the local office), and committing rampant corporate fraud. I also suspect that a few of the managers there were just straight up offloading their work to staff because staff billed lower, so they could screw around and do whatever. That place was pants-on-head crazy levels of dumpster fire.

  608. scaredtoworkthere*

    where to start, a few months into the pandemic a chain of assisted living facilities gathered marketing staff from across 2 states to sit shoulder to shoulder in a conference room in the corporate office for IN PERSON training. masks were “a personal choice” in the office. luckily my desk was in this building and i joined the meeting remotely (from my desk)

  609. Coffee time!*

    lol yes I had a toxic boss to who asked me to change my wedding date but at least was more do you think ? cus a big event was happening that the company got ..already was doing it in off season. So less people could come to wedding but no big deal more courtesy invites. One restaurant when young..boyfriend sister getting married..got my shift covered told manager about it..and he asks can’t it be changed. Also the same place that had a gang shooting inside at night and they didn’t tell me (worked early shift) so had the newspeople at my door with me going what? and two coffee cups covered in blood in the kitchen… only worked a month there. Restaurant didn’t last.

  610. Delta Delta*

    I had a coworker who convinced our boss to get everyone at our office help her neighbor move under the guise of a “community service” project. More than half our staff was gone for a full day helping some rando pack his boxes and move across town. I said no way, and was seen as “not a team player.”

  611. Samantha*

    Here is one. At my current job, we have to contact a client list of about 130 people. Every 6-7 weeks (once we are finished with the task, we start over and move to a new wave of clients). First we call, then if they don’t answer, we email and call again, and call a third time to try and set up a zoom meeting with them! But the kicker is that if we want to send any kind of email to a client that is not already drafted as a template- even one that just says, “Thank you for your email, what time works for you?” We have to get it approved by a manager first. And with all those emails, we have to BCC our managers and their project manager. EVERY SINGLE ONE. There’s only 4 managers, three of which don’t ever really approve the emails, and about 25 of us on the team with about 100-140 clients each time. So many emails get lost and we have to constantly be asking for their approval on each one.

    This all started because some people had typos in their emails. I’m so happy that I start a new job in a couple weeks.

  612. PhantomKate*

    When I was in high school, I worked at the high school’s indoor pool as a cashier. The lifeguards worked in the pool area, but I sat in an office with the manager. Usually the managers were college students, so although older than all the high school students, not necessarily the epitome of maturity. As you might expect, the high school indoor pool was not the busiest of places, so we had a lot of downtime in the office. While working one night, my manager asked me to trim his neck hair. He even had his trimmers with him. I was horrified by this at the time (and even more so now) and I know I protested a lot but I still did it. I remember saying to him “This is a terrible idea I have no idea what I’m actually doing” and I did a truly terrible job, kind of on purpose. What’s strange is that he was not someone who was weird or inappropriate before or after that event. I have no idea what he was thinking.

  613. C27390*

    Had to clean up the ditches outside of the compound because it was Earth Day. No gloves…the ditches were full of beer cans, empty alcohol bottles, broken glass, dirty diapers and used syringes….that is when I noped out. It was disgusting and dangerous.

  614. KAM*

    I was asked by a manager to postpone a fairly serious surgery because the date that it was scheduled for “was not convenient” for her. Needless to say I did NOT postpone the surgery

  615. RandaPanda*

    I did insurance sales and service very briefly about 6 years ago. And at one point a client had called in and they wanted to get quotes on some policy changes. A salesman ran over to my cubicle to mute my phone and tell me not to mention anything about that customers universal life policy, cause “they don’t know they have it.”.

  616. Ariana Grande's Ponytail*

    Ooh, I have one. At a job in academic research, I was asked to change the races of study participants so that the grant evaluator (from the NIH!!!) would give our recruitment their blessing.

  617. Hotel life*

    When I was in my early 20s, I used to work at the front desk of a hotel. I had worked there less than a year, both my AGM and GM quit within a couple of weeks of each other. Nothing terrible had happened; they both just had great opportunities elsewhere. We were told that the GM’s of our other hotels would be coming by a couple of days a week to run things.

    The first day that GM #1 came in, she marched into the back office without a word, went to the GM’s office, lit a cigarette, put her feet on the desk and demanded to see me. And by me, I mean she yelled “You at the front desk, get in here!” I had never met this woman before, had absolutely no idea that she was a GM and honestly thought some unstable person had broken into the office.

    She then proceeded to inform me that she thought this arrangement was bulls**t, that she would not be sitting foot here again, and we were not to call her under any circumstances. “It’s your problem; you deal with it”. The former GM happened to be in the building dealing with some last minute stuff, saw me at the desk, in near tears, and wanted to know what happened. I told him, he went back and informed her that she couldn’t talk to the staff that way or smoke in the office. I didn’t hear her reply, but she stomped out a few minutes later, followed by the former GM, carrying a smoking trash can. Apparently, when he came in, she tossed her cigarette in the trash can and had no intention of saying anything about it. I never saw her again and heard she got fired a couple of months later.

    It took them about 3 months to hire a new GM, who was this guy in his mid-20s and someone they had fired a couple of years before. In order to show us that he was the person in charge, he would call us back to his office to ask mundane questions. And by call, I mean he would call us on the phone from his office, 10 feet away. He would only do this if we were with a guest (a bank of security monitors were in his office) and if we didn’t answer his calls, he would start yelling out “front desk!”, because he never bothered to learn any of our names.

    I once had a guest confusingly ask who was asking for me and then said it was ok if I went to see what he wanted. What he wanted was for me to make copies of some fantasy sports draft thing and he wanted it right then. When I mentioned I was with a guest, he said he was aware, but he was my boss and that meant he was more important. He talked very loudly, so the guest could hear every word.

    He didn’t like that we wouldn’t drop what we were doing to copy/fax/place his lunch order while helping a guest, so he had maintenance install a wireless doorbell up front, so when he needed something he could just ring that over and over and over. When I was alone that night, I found it, took the batteries out, disabled it, and put it back. I think there were a total of 3 doorbells that were installed before he gave up.

    I didn’t last much longer before I quit. I found out later that he got fired when a guest saw him masturbating while watching porn in his office, which had a huge window that faced the front parking lot and had a sidewalk going past about 5 feet away.

  618. elle*

    I was asked to lead a seance to contact my toxic ex-boss’s adult son.

    My toxic ex-boss said it was because the accident that killed her adult son was my aunt’s fault.

    My toxic ex-boss had never met my aunt, and my aunt had never met my toxic ex-boss’s adult son.

    I refused to lead the seance, and my toxic ex-boss screamed and screamed and tried to have me fired over it. Then she got even angrier when I quit two weeks later.

    Oh, and it turned out that my toxic ex-boss’s adult son was not actually dead. He just refused to speak to my toxic ex-boss (his mother), because she’d thrown him out of the house, on Christmas Eve, when he was 16, because she’d found out he was gay.

  619. Megan*

    I used to work in charity PR and quite often worked with egotistical directors with inflated senses of self-importance. One asked if I could get Brad Pitt(!!) to come and work with us to promote the organisation (we were a very small, British health-related charity). A friend of mine with a similar job was told to get Dame Judi Dench and even went so far as to call her agent to see if it could be arranged (it couldn’t). Another director insisted that I should arrange for him to speak at a prestigious event and was furious when I timidly reported back that we’d have to pay to attend and that they didn’t want him to speak. He insisted this was my fault as I wasn’t experienced enough to get this opportunity for him.

    1. Edwina*

      This is like a story from Rob Brydon’s show, the one where he had a QI type show and had delusions of grandeur, I can’t remember the name but it was just so funny!

  620. Worker bee*

    I was at work and we get a pretty hardcore, sheets of rain kind of thunderstorm. I’m working on moving some things and putting out wet floor signs, when a woman walks in and demands to know what we are going to do about what has happened to her car, which was parked under one of our trees. I’m thinking that maybe a branch fell or something, but no. The issue? Leaves had fallen on her car and she wanted someone to come out and hose her car off. In the pouring rain.

    I’m speechless, then say something about how the rain will wash them off. She starts looking around, sees a hose near the entrance and says she’ll just do it herself. Since I assume that there’s some sort of liability issue with her doing that, I say I’ll take care of it.

    I spend a good 5 minutes, in the pouring rain, hosing leaves off a woman’s car, while she stood nearby and supervised, as she wanted every single leaf off her car. She’s wearing a raincoat and carrying an umbrella; I am in a t-shirt and shorts. She finally sighs, says that’s “good enough” and gets in her car and drives away without so much as a thank you.

    I am soaked to the skin and go to the supply closet to grab a huge handful of towels that are the size of hand towels, so I can dry off and wring out my clothes.

    A couple of days later, the owner asked me if I knew anything about a woman’s car covered in leaves. I said I knew all about it and wondered how he knew. She called the office to complain that an employee was rude to her and dismissive of her problem.

  621. LuJessMin*

    Late to the party as always – I worked in Accounting at an US oil company owned by a large South American country. One year, we sold a large amount of product to said company (in the neighborhood of $10M) at the end of the year. Terms were FOB (freight on board), which meant they bought it on the ship at our refinery. However, they didn’t want a $10M purchase on their books at the end of the year, so asked us to keep it in a “shadow plant” ON OUR BOOKS. Yeah, no, that wasn’t happening.

  622. Lily of the Meadow*

    I was working in fast food, and got a whole pot of coffee, that had gotten stuck in the filter part of the coffeemaker, poured all over my hand when I pulled the filter out to change it out and start coffee, because the coffeepot was sitting on a hot burner, empty. This coffee was about 186 degrees; and my hand immediately turned bright red and started blistering. This was during breakfast, on Labor Day in the U.S. I was told I could not leave until the breakfast rush ended. I was a cashier on the front line, taking and filling orders, and attempting to work with one functional hand, as I tried to keep a plastic bag filled with ice on my burned hand. I think it was three or four hours before I was allowed to leave, and the doctors at the ER were not happy with me, as I had severe second degree burns on my hand, which had already begun the process of melding together. I could have wound up with a webbed hand, all so that people I did not know could get their biscuits and gravy.

  623. WellHere'sTheThingJanet*

    A long time ago, i was asked to file taxes using a W-2 that was clearly under-reported by 25%. Was told it would be “made up in the next year and we’ll cover any increased taxes you will pay.”

    Hahaha-no. You pay me very well but i’m not committing a felony for you. I went through IRS, got a paper trail, and filed using an amended form that was a royal pain to do, but better than cheating the taxman. Still surprised i never heard back from the company or the IRS and I’ve been gone for years now..i guess I got my calculations correct

  624. Switz42*

    It’s been years since I thought of this, but when I worked in a mall in my twenties, I had two separate stores demand I be there for specific holiday times (one as a manager on Black Friday, one as an assistant manager on Christmas Eve) despite being the only person who was from out of state. So I complied. In the first instance, I was home (about 300 miles away) for about 26 hours (landed at my home airport about 11 pm; got back to work on Black Friday by 7 am because that was when the store opened.) It was not any busier than any other day, as we had no special sales or anything, though to be fair it was a fairly new business and they’d have no way to predict that. I have SEVERAL stories about that place, long since out of business.

    In the second instance, I was home for slightly longer, about 45 hours if I remember correctly, and was forced to schedule my flight home for early evening on Christmas Eve so as to work a full shift beforehand. I showed up for work, it was dead, and after approximately 2-3 hours with not a lot to do, my manager announced that she’d be headed home to start her Christmas dinner preparations. In her town approximately 20 minutes from the mall. While I, who had not seen my family in three months (didn’t go home for Thanksgiving at this job because of the nightmare negotiating Christmas) needed to stay and finish out my shift (even though the other assistant manager was there and able to cover it.) And on my way BACK December 26th (a journey which necessitated planes, trains and buses, literally, because I didn’t drive at the time and this was pre-Uber/Lyft/etc.) this same manager called me and asked me to come straight in without going home to deposit my stuff (including a printer my dad gave me) because it was busy. Which I did. And it was, for about two hours after I arrived. At which point the manager declared she was tired and went home. All of this for the princely sum of (I think; it’s been a long time) $9 an hour.

    (I should probably also mention that after I left that job, I did come in and have her look at the back of my thigh, to see if the dog bite I’d sustained was bad. But that’s another story altogether.)

  625. nancydrew*

    When winter storm Yuri hit my state, the tech support team I managed was hit very hard. Many were without power, experienced burst pipes causing significant damage and no running water. My boss and second line didn’t have electricity either and we’re not concerned about much other than themselves.

    I made the decision to reduce operations to 12 hours a day instead of 24. I had extremely dedicated direct reports and we leveraged our resources to form the most skeletal staff we could muster. The power grid was almost completely out of service statewide. I made sure to be there with them the whole time and made sure they were getting breaks, providing updates, checking on my reports that were running out of charge, gas and food.

    When my boss’s power came back on, she told me to tell my team mandatory overtime was in order. I explained that I do not like the idea of mandatory overtime. I told her I had reports that went above and beyond so if I have to meet them in the middle, they should be exempted as well as my normal weekend crew that works a ten-hour shift. This was not reasonable to the boss. She also told me that I should approve time cards or pay anyone who was impacted during what ended up being a federally declared state of emergency. Anyway, folks got paid, mandatory overtime didn’t happen, my volunteers got the small ticket backlog taken care of in a day, and I ended up negotiating a severance 4 months later.

  626. MJRedRaven*

    Ooh! I’ve got one to throw on this massive pile!
    I was working at a big box store (Canadian) as a cashier/customer service clerk, so my job was just helping customers, and doing a tiny amount of admin (answering phones, sorting mail). One day the store manager – who reminded me of a coked-up squirrel – asked if she could have a minute of my time. There were no customers at the front, so I said, “sure”. She proceeds to tell me she has this grand plan to make the customer service desk area more efficient, make the checkouts faster, etc. THEN she tells me (bear in mind I was 19 at the time and this was all I had done for work) that she wants ME to design the space! I tried many things to get her to get rid of this crazy idea, because there was no way I was going to do that and get blamed for a major screw up, and finally succeeded wen I asked when I was going to get the paid time to do this. She tried arguing that I could just do it during my normal shifts, but then I said, “I know a bit about drafting from shop class, and I’m going to need tools, space to work, and quiet, which won’t be possible when I’m behind the desk”.
    Thankfully she dropped it after that.
    AND… 2 years later when she didn’t show up for work, and we found out she’d run off with a trucker in the middle of the night and left everything behind, no one was really all that surprised.

  627. Worker bee*

    I have another, which I had completely blocked out.

    I was a temp and was assigned to a long term position with a software company that specialized in medical software. I had been there about two weeks, when the owner called me into his office to ask how things were going, if I was settling in ok, etc. I told him things were good and he said he was happy to hear that, because he wanted me to stay permanently. I was happy about this and started to ask about benefits and such. He started laughing and kept laughing.

    When he was able to speak, he said I had misunderstood and that he wanted me to be a permanent temp. He said he was paying the temp agency $30 a hour for my services and it would cost too much to buy me out of my contract and then he’d have to pay me benefits, so keeping me as a temp would be a “win/win” for both of us. I was making $11 a hour and had been told that the temp agency didn’t disclose what benefits they offered until you were employed with them for a year.

    I wasn’t allowed to attend the all staff meetings, but was required to attend the mandatory, off site team-building seminars. I was also told that, if I needed a day off, I was to tell him, but not the agency (this comes up later).

    I’m about 6 weeks into this when I get called for jury duty the next month. I immediately notify the agency, as well as him, and everyone said that was fine. The day before I’m supposed to report, he tells me that we’re getting ready to do a huge launch of something and that it’ll be ‘all hands’ on X date. I remind him that I won’t be there tomorrow, because of jury duty. He gets extremely angry and demands to know why I would “volunteer” for something like that, during the work day, and during this critical period (I would be stuffing envelopes). He was a naturalized citizen and had been living in the US for 30+ years, so I was baffled that he didn’t understand that this happens.

    He told me to just not show up, tell “them” I have to work, and just generally do whatever it takes to get out of it. Including suggesting, completely seriously, that I bring a GUN to the courthouse. I tell him that, not only am I not doing that, doing so won’t have them dismiss me from jury duty, it will get me arrested, so I still wouldn’t be able to go to work.

    Near the end of my day, he pulled me into his office and told me that he expected me no later than 1 pm the next day and, if I was picked for a jury, he would terminate my employment and leave a terrible review for me with the temp agency.

    I immediately went out to my car to inform the temp agency of all of that and they were furious that I hadn’t informed them of jury duty. When I told them I had called and followed up with an email to my contact, they said they had no record of the email. I told them I no longer wanted to work for the company, effective immediately, they informed me that was extremely unprofessional and that I was required to put in two weeks notice in order to stop working for that particular company. I refused and they terminated me from the agency, saying doing so with destroy my career and that they will do everything they can to make sure I am never employed again.

  628. Yeah, nah*

    Work in an office with a vibrant, healthy, toxic black mould colony living in the carpet.

    Every human is allergic to toxic black mould, of course, but I am violently allergic to mould in any circumstances (including penicillin).

  629. Hmmm*

    Return to work two days after major surgery, against doctor’s orders, because my boss “just needed me back in the office”.

    I was able to hold him off for a while working week, before I stupidly went back in because he threatened to fire me, which he could not legally do, but it was the GFC and it was my first job.

    He threw a massive tantrum when I ended up needing to take even more time off because returning to work too early made me even more ill.

    He also suggested that anyone who needed more than one toilet break in a full working day “just need to wear nappies”.

    He’d complain about and bully anyone who took a sick day, and when a (much-loved, senior female) colleague was diagnosed with cancer, and needed to take some time off for treatment, he whined “this is the last thing I need! She is so inconsiderate. She shouldn’t have gone to the doctor so early”. (Because her treatment was “inconvenient” to him.)

    Oh, and none of the “inconveniences” that any team member caused him with things like urgent medical treatment ever actually clashed with important deadlines or other critical issues.

    He was just an awful human being.

  630. Environmental Compliance*

    I know this is late, but I had to jump in.

    I used to work at a small county health department – my job was with wells, septic systems, and environmental complaints (like farms, illegal burning, etc.), but the department did have a new STI clinic onsite with a couple nurses. My boss, who was head of the entire department figured out that I knit and told me – while I was walking a septic contractor back to review the install plans for the permit – that I absolutely needed to knit a set of male genitalia complete with all of the different STIs. A good deal of importance was put on the accuracy of visual symptoms and of…size.

    I declined, but my boss asked me *daily* about it for about 3 weeks.

    (Also, Boss didn’t want to pay for my time or yarn for this, of course.)

  631. NeedRain47*

    Until reading these, I’d forgotten about the guy at my first job after college who was hired for a higher level tech position but didn’t ever do any work, hid in his office, and refused to answer his phone. Customers started calling the main phone b/c they were frustrated by not being able to get ahold of him. At one point he happened to be passing through the room when I had just answered a call for him. He told me to tell them he was at lunch, despite the fact that it was about 9:45 in the morning. Not being keen on stupid and obvious lies, I simply said he wasn’t available. He ended up gone a few weeks later and apparently they found all the vendor bills he was supposed to be paying in a desk drawer.

  632. redsoxwererobbed*

    I worked for a very well-known company when it was still a start-up. One of the founders (who subsequently lied about being in the Miracle on the Hudson plane crash, but that’s a different story) kept pestering one of our interns to figure out a way to illegally ship alcohol out of the country as a way to ‘expand our business offerings’. She kept telling him it was impossible and he kept telling her she lacked the vision and creativity to work at a start-up. She wasn’t offered a full-time position.

    I quit about a year later. I want to punch my computer every time I see his face in a business article.

  633. Maseca*

    So late now, but I remembered a great one. Years ago, my SO was an assistant to a small-time film/TV producer. The boss signed up for a correspondence course on how to stop procrastinating — but she fell behind and assigned my SO to do the coursework for her.

  634. PeasNThanks*

    I got a final written warning for lowering the cost of an employee-paid benefit by 0.5%, during our annual benefits renewal, by simply asking the broker. When I proudly told my boss what I had done (negotiating benefits was within the scope of my job and I had done so for three years prior), I got yelled at. I thought they misunderstood, that the benefits had gone up, not down, so I reiterated it was a savings. Which got me into even more trouble.

  635. anon4eva*

    Weird one but I used to work at a clothing store, and one time, we had a customer take a dump in the dressing room. The smell alone made us temporarily shut down the store. The store manager ran around trying to order someone to clean it up and the general consensus was we’d rather quit and walk out than deal with that (never mind we were making $5.75 an hour, below minimum wage).
    Finally, she said she’d be the “hero” of the store, wrapped a new unused shirt around her face, grabbed another shirt and a garbage bag and ran into the dressing room, scooped up the excrement with the unused shirt and threw everything into the garbage bag. She then unwrapped the shirt from her face and threw up into the bag.
    My coworkers laughed and shamed her, recording the whole thing on their phones. It became a running joke later to tell her to clean the dressing room.

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