let’s discuss people who find themselves in a hole and just keep digging

by Alison Green on August 1, 2024

Let’s talk about people who found themselves in a hole and just kept digging.

Think, for example, of the person who didn’t get a job because a woman she bullied was a rock star employee at the company where she was applying … which somehow ended with her screaming at the rock star and rock star’s husband at a restaurant.

Or the guy who told his interviewer he never made mistakes … and then decided to make the problem much, much worse?

Or, on a lighter note, this person who answered an interview question by talking about the Maury Povich Show and then just couldn’t stop?

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you should have stopped but instead just kept going and made things even worse? Or seen someone else do it? Let’s discuss.

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  1. Justin*

    Let’s see. I had a colleague who, years ago, was being asked to use a new system that was being implemented. It seems like she was a bit intimidated by the technology, so she just refused to use it, made up excuses for why it wasn’t being used (I am reminded of Michael Scott saying “power… point”), and then when our (new) mutual boss insisted she use it, she said she didn’t need to take orders from anyone, which was immediately true because then she lost her job.

    1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      Oh I’ve definitely seen that time and time again. There have been many people at my org that just don’t want to accept a new system — whatever it is. New payroll software that has us submit timesheets and PTO requests online instead of old system of PAPER sheets that need to be signed by supervisors and interoffice mailed to the payroll department and then input into the computer? “I’m going to refuse to do my timesheets AT ALL, lol.”

      3. Somehow I Manage*

        Without giving away too much, we had to switch some software. One person absolutely hated it. Others learned the new system and work with it just fine. The customer experience was better by leaps and bounds. Were there some initial glitches? Yep. Were there differences in UX between the two for staff? Yep. Was it something that should bring someone to tears multiple times? Nope. When the person left, during their exit interview, they talked about how they felt diminished in their work because they had raised concerns about the new system and didn’t feel heard because we actually made the switch. I’m not faulting someone for feeling feelings, but just because you raise concerns doesn’t mean you get your way when the customer’s experience (the ones who pay the bills) is 1000x better… and the business saves money in the long run, too.

        1. Anon for this*

          Yeah, my employer’s going to be radically changing all its software next year. My father also works here. He’s griping about having to learn a new system.

          I’m now jamming all the ways the current system is acceptable for what his job requires him to use it for, but absolutely garbage in ways that make it horrible for the people who have to actually maintain it and use it to process requests. He’s slowly becoming less and less stubbornly resistant to change.

          1. allathian*

            When we switched to SharePoint/Teams two years ago, two coworkers on my team elected to take early retirement because they didn’t want to spend their two or three remaining years in the workforce learning those systems. I guess it was their right to do so, but it seems stupid because their retirement checks are something like 20 percent smaller than they would be if they’d worked until they reached the age of retirement on full benefits.

            The irony of it is that we used to use Skype before Teams, so they knew a simpler chat system already, and the intranet we used before SharePoint was a customized system that was released before it was ready and the search function remained crappy for as long as we used it. And I love the collaborative file sharing functions on SharePoint.

            1. Meow*

              25 years of often pointless software updates will do that to you. So many increase workload, are counterintuitive, and do nothing to make the end user experience better, easier, more efficient.

            2. rebelwithmouseyhair*

              The thing is when you’ve had to grapple with so many systems that are released before they are ready, there comes a point where you just don’t wanna ever more. I don’t know what version of Windows I have, nor do I know what is the latest version, but I’m pretty sure there have been at least two releases since my laptop was installed. Maybe the more recent versions have better shiny features but I’ve got to the point where my attitude is, if it ain’t broke I ain’t fixin’ it.

      4. smirkette*

        I used to be on an internal IT help desk as part of my role, and this gave me flashbacks of the user who thought I should just handle their tasks in a new platform FOR them, instead of teaching them how to do it themselves because isn’t support staff supposed to support? (For this particular platform, I was the support lead for over a thousand active users, and it wasn’t even the whole of my task portfolio.) The culture was SO toxic towards support staff, and was one of many reasons I quit that awful job. No workplace is perfect, but I truly wish a plague on that place and its self-important bloviating gas sacks.

      5. I'm A Little Teapot*

        I’m an auditor. In auditing payroll, one of the questions I ask is “if you don’t get a time sheet, can you still pay the person?” Almost universally, that question results in a huge sigh. Hunting down timesheets is a big thing.

        If the process has changed – new software, etc, then there’s usually an eyeroll as well as the sigh, followed by the explanation that the transition had some bumps so yes, in some cases they were told to do a paycheck. But there’s also a comment about the big boss sent an email out or something and after that no timesheet = no paycheck, so things got a little messy. When I look at the detail, yeah, there’s always some people who missed a payperiod or 2. I have seen situations where a final check was paid out not long after, so people got fired over the whole thing.

        And yes, I know there’s laws about timeliness of paychecks. My clients aren’t always that knowledgeable.

        1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

          Fired or quit. When my org implemented our new online timesheets, some people quit. To bring it back to in a hole and still digging… no one was auditing old records so the folks who had been getting away with fraud wouldn’t have been punished for previous infractions, they just found themselves having to honestly track time and PTO in the future and thought, “Nah, I quit instead.”

          They’d been getting away with timecard fraud. The easiest way to have unlimited PTO? Don’t write it down on your timesheet and have a manager sign it without double checking a pile a written requests for whether they were here or not. All PTO requests were going online, so it would auto populate their timesheet with days they weren’t here.

          1. Disappointed Australien*

            We have the opposite problem at my workplace. The person who does the pays is semi-retired and misses a bunch of stuff. I have officially used about 1/3rd of the sick days I’ve taken, for example, despite using the prescribed process. It’s not all upside, they also struggle to pay everyone on time every time so some people get to spend their day-after-payday asking politely if perhaps they could be paid please.

            Hopefully that work is being handed off soon so processes will improve. Sadly I expect that my sick and annual leave will be more accurately tracked from then on.

      6. alto*

        Refusing to do your timesheets because you don’t want to learn the new system is kind of absurd… don’t you want to get paid?

      7. Dhaskoi*

        I have actually seen people quit rather than move on from paper timesheets.

        (admittedly in an industry where people move around a lot, but still)

      8. Vio*

        I can sympathise to an extent, it’s always difficult for me to adjust to change, but there’s a big difference between preference and necessity. If work allows your preference, great! But if it’s a requirement then it’s a requirement. Some battles are worth fighting but we see a lot of examples of people picking the pettiest of (mole)hills to die on.

    2. Le Sigh*

      There was a time when my old org maintained two email systems bc a handful of people petulantly refused to switch over and they had the ear of the right people to win that fight. Our system admin was SO HAPPY when those same right people left and the stubborn holdouts could no longer refuse to switch. He was even happier when the stubborn holdouts left themselves — you’ll be shocked to know email wasn’t the only way they made life difficult.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      WOWWW. Wow. What a loss to the community. What a strange downward spiral, she was so in her feelings that she closed down her own restaurant (do you live in the area? Have they actually reopened?)

      1. MigraineMonth*

        I’ve heard of white fragility, and I’m not entirely surprised that a white woman decided “My momentary discomfort from being called out is more important than the feelings or livelihoods of my staff.”

        Still, it takes a special kind of narcissism (the personality trait, not diagnosing anything) to say “My momentary discomfort from being called out is more important than my reputation in the community and *my own livelihood*.”

        1. CommanderBanana*

          Her brother is also a restauranteur, and the staff at the restaurant he owned also all went on strike and then quit because he wouldn’t stop coming in and sexually harassing the staff.

          Being garbage people must run in the family.

    2. Irish Teacher.*

      Oooh, now I’m thinking of the Cooks Source debacle. Now that was an example of digging and digging and digging…

        1. Irish Teacher.*

          It was a big internet sensation about 14 years ago. This college student found a recipe or article she wrote in Cooks Source magazine, without her permission and with no credit to her. She wrote to them and asked them to correct this and donate to charity in her name. She got a really scathing letter in response along the lines of “you should just be grateful we didn’t claim we wrote it ourselves. It happens a lot. Clearly you don’t understand how this works. And I tidied the article up for you, so now you can use it in your portfolio. You should be paying me.” (I believe the “tidying up” involved changing things like “ye olde” to “the old” when it was originally written that way for effect.)

          Anyway, the college student posted about this online, the internet got involved and once people looked at Cooks Source magazine, it turned out they had plagiarised from everybody, including celebrity chefs and Disney and of course, as this went public, fairly soon lawyers’ letters were being threatened and people contacted advertisers to let them now a hailstorm was coming and they didn’t want to be associated with this publication.

          I think the editor posted once more, talking about how she appreciated the publicity or something, but yeah…I bet she ended by wishing she’d just printed the apology originally asked for or even…just ignored the request, which would have been obnoxious, but…she’d probably have gotten away with it.

          1. Texas Teacher*

            Ooh, Disney is ruthless and extremely vigilant in protecting their IP. I would not recommend messing with them!

            1. Irish Teacher.*

              Yeah, I remember somebody mentioning Disney and then somebody commented saying they worked for Disney and would pass it on to their legal department and everybody was like, “they messed with Disney. They are in so much trouble now.”

              I think it’s the only internet drama that I was following before it massively blew up. I came across it when it looked like it was just somebody plagiarising and then being really horrible and condescending to a young woman. I remember finding it infuriating but thinking that she probably wouldn’t be able to do anything and then…yeah…

          2. Daubenton*

            It was so epic it has a Wikipedia page, at least one hashtag #buthonestlymonica, and was named Journalistic Error of the Year for 2010.

            “But honestly Monica, the web is considered ‘public domain’ and you should be happy we just didn’t ‘lift’ your whole article and put someone else’s name on it!”

            There’s no coming back from that!

            1. Our Business Is Rejoicing*

              Monica was/is a member of a huge nerd community I’m part of, which is part of the reason people like Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi got involved. She wasn’t a student, but was a researcher of medieval cookery. Ain’t no rage like nerd rage.

          3. Wizzard_of_Four_Ecks*

            Oh I remember this one! The editor said that since it was on the internet it couldn’t be copyright protected which was incredibly wrong

            1. Worldwalker*

              The town I live on the fringes of jacked a ph0to of a downtown event from a local photographer and used it on the city website. The photographer asked them to pay him for it, as per the terms on his site. They said it was on the Internet so they didn’t have to. The city attorney tried to argue that in court.

              Yeah … a judge schooled said city attorney on copyright law. Rather forcefully. And the resulting damages were a lot higher than they would have paid to license the picture. (heck, he probably would have just let them if they’d asked)

            2. goddessoftransitory*

              *Dave Barry looks at the article he wrote about the blown up whale*

              *Sighs deeply*

            3. not nice, don't care*

              I work with copyright law. Oh lordy do I hate explaining this to people who should know better.

            4. londonedit*

              I have so many authors who think ‘it’s on the internet, therefore I can use it’. They send me images and quotes and all the rest of it, and I ask them for the sources and permissions, and they’re like ‘Um…I got it from Google Images?’ No.

      1. I Have RBF*

        LOL!

        I can understand deciding to stop being vegan. I even agree with them about religious vegans being … special. But the rest? Oh, holy shit! If they wanted to change up their menu they should A) stop claiming to be vegan/vegetarian, B) provide notice of the upcoming changes to their existing customers, and C) don’t engage with trolls by trying to troll them.

        1. GreenGirl*

          I go to a steak house, I expect steak. I go to a Mexican restaurant, I expect Mexican food. I go to a vegetarian restaurant, I expect it to be vegetarian.

    5. San Diego Tea*

      Something very similar happened to a brewery owner in San Diego – https://www.sandiegoville.com/2019/03/reckless-brewing-announces-impending.html

      TL;DR – On March 5, 2019 the owner changed the name of a black lager to Black Lagers Matter, then when people called him out he first doubled down (“Ok. People are offended. I had no idea people would react like this. No one was insulted. No one was demeaned. I was talking about beer.”) and then apologized… poorly (“I am truly sorry. I admit to my ignorance of knowing what would offend. I am a stupid stupid man, but I am not a racist”). People were still upset, he tried to apologize again, but by March 8 he announced that he was going to close the brewery.

      It was pretty sad because I liked the brewery, I’d met and liked the owner, the brewery was his retirement passion project, and I do think he was speaking from a place of ignorance and not malice, but his initial “some people can’t take a joke” reaction and the “woe is me” tone in the subsequent apologies did him no favors.

    6. I Have RBF*

      WTF?

      I understand her being uncomfortable with the slur being used in the music. But I, as a white enby, would not quote the music! I would just mention that “I am uncomfortable with the N word being blasted over the speakers in the restaurant because I feel it is discourteous to my employees.”

      As a white person, even quoting the lyrics of an offensive song is a minefield, and can easily be disrespectful to Black people. That word coming out of a white person’s mouth, even as a quote, is a microaggression. (Some white folks use “I was just quoting…” as an excuse to say the slur, and it’s pretty obnoxious.)

      But no, she quoted it and then doubled down. Then gave essentially a “I’m sorry you felt offended.” nopology.

      What a mess.

      1. Ace in the Hole*

        I would understand if she just quoted the lyrics she objected to once when explaining why she didn’t want the song playing. Yeah, not the best approach, but people can’t always find the perfect way to express themselves in the middle of an uncomfortable situation.

        But what she actually said/did was SO much worse… and completely inexcusable.

      2. K*

        Right, I feel like the initial incident could have been forgivable if she’d regrouped and apologized. But instead…. She just kept digging.

    7. The Prettiest Curse*

      It’s interesting that all the examples people mention in this thread are from the food and drink world. I wonder if their meltdowns are just more public than those in other industries.

      1. Disappointed Australien*

        Any public world has this, even weird ones like the science fiction community. The “sad puppy” debacle, for example, was some people trying way too hard for way too long to force SF back into the “good old days”.

        There was also the “lawyers love sexual harassment” thing in Aotearoa where a well known firm worked really hard for several years to force the government to hold a public inquiry into their internal workings.

        You might also consider various popes and their approach to children in this context. Or the near-collapse of the Anglican Church in Canada.

        https://nzfvc.org.nz/news/report-published-review-law-firm-handling-sexual-harassment-and-assault

      2. Mongrel*

        I’d put forward that there’s probably a higher percentage of businesses owned by individuals, no HR to rein them in.
        It’s also, probably, why the entire sector is riddled with toxicity and dysfunction

        1. metadata minion*

          Yeah, I think this is a key point here — a large percentage of them are small businesses and/or franchises.

    8. Sociology Rocks!*

      I just want to say thank you for the inadvertent reminder to subscribe to Indyweek, I’ve been meaning to for ages!

      As a fellow triangle area citizen wow this is terrible and indeed digging the whole deeper, though the unified solidarity the staff clearly had for each other is lovely. Equally disappointed to learn the brother runs Acme, it’s delicious but thankfully there a a plethora of other wonderful restaurants here

    9. The Unionizer Bunny*

      Callaghan also fired Plum’s executive chef, Trent Shank, over email when he refused to back her up amid the fallout from the incident, according to former employees.

      I’m reading “executive chef” as a manager of some kind, so the NLRA can be set aside.

      I think she may be liable for firing him over his refusal, though. I don’t know who supplied that word (perhaps the reporter is using her own words), but it implies that the manager told him to back her up and he said “no, I won’t”. This is one of the circumstances where it would have been safer to provide more information, rather than just try to keep his head down and stay out of it:

      https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-retaliation-and-related-issues#a._Expansive

      Shank passively doing nothing instead of backing her up: inadequate to establish his opposition to discrimination. Shank actively calling her out for racial discrimination and refusing to follow orders connected to it: might then qualify as protected opposition. (I’m not sure how the courts would come down on this because “back her up” is not obviously discriminatory. This is another one of those areas where the exact circumstances aren’t really nailed down by a reporter’s coverage, but a good attorney would follow up with him to find out if he had a strong case. Civil rights attorneys often work on contingency, taking a portion of any award, so they seek out work opportunities more than attorneys who want to know that their clients can afford services up-front.)

      The bartender who was told “you are part of this chapter that I need to close” is more protected (see: “inference”). The other workers can probably file for UI since a racist boss firing the manager who was standing up for the workers against racism is an alteration to their working conditions that forced them to resign (effectively firing them).

    10. Vio*

      Wow. Not understanding why some people can use a word and others can’t is something I can kind of understand. Logically it doesn’t make sense. But taking into account the contexts and history of a word and the connection to different cultures… most people would realise that it’s not a simple word but is instead a statement. Regardless of whether you intend it to be or not, using the word sends a message. That message can be deeply offensive and most people upon realising they’ve accidentally offended somebody will want to clear up the misunderstanding and apologise.
      Then we have the more noticeable minority who pass the responsibility off and double down. The crazy thing is how deep the denial can go and how oblivious they can be to their error. It’s the equivalent of saying “Oh, I didn’t mean to offend you so * off you *ing *er” then defending yourself by claiming you said sorry (even though it was only a vaguely implied apology rather than anything close to an actual one) and acting like an innocent victim.

        1. Meep*

          +1 He was still trying to mansplain to someone with far more experience than him, even after he was told to drop it.

          1. Vio*

            I may be misremembering but I think it continued in the comments as well with the OP still refusing to acknowledge any error.

      2. ScruffyInternHerder*

        After reviewing the update, nah. He (? – note that I think the LW clarified this, but I may be jumping to conclusions here) doubled/tripled down and I don’t think that there will be any major changes. More likely to see “…and here’s why I was blackballed in my industry (which was the LW’s assertation in the follow up) and its WRONG.”

        1. KateLynn1335*

          Am I the only one who thinks he can’t be really or serious? He like personifies every recruiters worst nightmare :)

          2. Meep*

            I am happy you haven’t had to encounter men like this, but as a female engineer, they are so very real.

            1. I Have RBF*

              This.

              There’s a reason that guys like James Damore of Google infamy are a recurring trope in tech – there are so damn many of them that it has become a stereotype – incel misogynist mansplainy tech bro with delusions of godhood.

            1. stratospherica*

              Yeah, as someone who works in HR in a major tech company, I’ve had to deal with my fair share of mansplainy guys who think that anyone can do my job and that if you’re not in STEM, you’re not doing anything valuable. They tend to be incredibly difficult to work for and adversarial from the moment you come into contact with them.

          4. Irish Teacher.*

            Oh, I believe it’s real. He sounds really invested in believing he doesn’t make mistakes – he even said that he can’t get his head around the idea that making mistakes is OK – so he just has to convince himself he is right, even if that means everybody else must be wrong – the interviewer, Alison, us… It sounds like a lot of his sense of self is tied up in being somebody “who never makes a mistake,” so admitting he might be wrong about anything would mean rethinking everything.

        2. ferrina*

          Is it bad that I sort of want him to write in with an update, just so I can see how far he can dig this hole?

          1. MigraineMonth*

            “So, I’m writing this from the Russian embassy after the US government UNFAIRLY revoked my citizenship just because they wouldn’t admit that I was right…”

          2. Ess Ess*

            I kept waiting for another update that would include some story about getting in legal trouble for stalking (either physical or electronic) that he’d upgraded to in order to prove the people he was blaming were talking/emailing/texting negative things about him.

          3. Humble Schoolmarm*

            I want an update from his partner. He said that his solution to the “blackballing” was going back to school for a Masters but partner was dubious. I just want to know how this dude deals with the little mistakes of life (like, ‘I forgot to set my alarm’ or ‘I put out the garbage on recycling day’) Does he freak out? Blame the trash collectors? Does the partner have to deal with all the minutia so he doesn’t have to deal with mistakes?
            Also, in true cross-over fashion, wonder how many “Not Always Right” stories he stars in if he has 0 tolerance for any mistakes from anyone ever.

        3. Antilles*

          There’s not going to be any learning from this (at least not any time soon) and you can see it in right in the first real sentence of the update. Alison’s phrasing and hundreds of different comments all get dismissed instantly with a single phrase of “I don’t think people really understood”.
          If 1,000 people simultaneously fail to understand your point, anybody with even the slightest bit of humility and self-honesty would recognize that means *something*. If nothing else, at the very least you clearly didn’t explain yourself very well. But there’s no evidence in the entire update of even THAT minor level of self-reflection and admission of mistakes.

        4. Jackrabbit*

          He is a man, which we know because in the original letter he went out of his way to note that “(I don’t know if it matters but I’m male and everyone I interviewed with was female.)” What a prince.

      3. Mobius 1*

        More likely: “No, I don’t do that, but let me tell you about this series of absolute whoppers I had committed upon me during a previous job search!”

      1. Legally Brunette*

        I feel so very bad for LW’s wife – poor, beleaguered woman, living with that …

          1. Ultimate Facepalm*

            I was too! And I have not made the best choices in my romantic life, but there is a woman out there who married this guy so at least I am not at the bottom of the barrel.

        2. Snarl Trolley*

          I’ll admit that in this case, I hope the LW may be so spectacularly blinkered to his own perception of himself/others/the world that perhaps it loops back around to making him exceptionally easy to manipulate – which is comforting to imagine his wife has a precision bead on, and plays his ego like a fiddle to gain anything she desires.

          1. Vio*

            “Honey you remember how you said you could do a better job than the bin men? Well since you couldn’t have been mistaken could you just nip the garbage down to the local tip? Oh and the neighbours too. And while you’re out remember that because you’re so successful you can afford to buy all these expensive frivolities and get your life insurance updated to your actual worth and then clean out the lawn mower blades…”

    3. Resume please*

      My jaw hit the floor when he told the hiring manager to tell her boss “to stop talking about me” and wanted to contact her LinkedIn contacts because he was convinced that his wonky interview answer had definitively “blackballed” him from the tech developer industry.

        1. Meep*

          Seriously. And not in the way he expects.

          They are all sitting around at conferences saying “I just interviewed the least self-aware jerk I have ever met.” And she (the original “blackballer”) is chiming in, “Oh yeah! We rejected him because we found a better candidate and the poor thing insisted I blackballed him. He is a real piece of work, isn’t he?”

          1. Bacon Pancakes*

            And if he *WERE* to pursue it, a raised eyebrow and “oh, Mr Perfect previously applied for TechCorp. Legally, that is all I am allowed to say.” would do /sarcasm/ WONDERS for his career.

      2. Wendy Darling*

        Also asking Alison how to convince his wife that getting a masters wasn’t a bad plan.

        I am here in tech and in most technical roles getting a masters IS a bad plan — it doesn’t add much to your resume, it’s expensive, and hiring managers would MUCH rather see two years of work experience than two more years of school. There are some specific subfields where it’s desirable, but it’s mostly not. And this is me reading into it a bit but I strongly suspect if this guy was in one of those subfields he’d either have done the masters already or have already been planning on it.

      1. Clorinda*

        Agreed. I don’t think her problem was Rock Star at first, but her own fragility becoming obvious during interviews. then, of course, her interactions with RS became the problem.

        Certainly most of what she described was self-inflicted and not RS at all.

        2. Lydia*

          When the LW saw the post from Rock Star about seeking help and the hotlines, I really felt like Rock Star was very low key also talking to the LW. Because all of what Rock Star posted could easily apply to LW in that moment.

          1. C*

            Agreed, and I also feel like that was the absolute kindest thing RS could possibly have said and in the nicest possible way. I really, really hope that LW eventually got the help they needed.

        3. Vio*

          Honestly I think an annual mental health checkup becoming standard (and affordable!) for everybody would do wonders for society.

      3. ferrina*

        Yeah, that sounded awful. The whole situation with the job that was far away and the cheating boyfriend was just terrible. That would definitely send me into a depressive spiral.

        I really hope that she was able to get back on her feet, and she was able to keep growing in her emotional capabilities and self-reflection. She seemed like she had grown a lot since high school, but still had a little more work to do so she wasn’t blaming Rock Star (who was in no way to blame for any of it)

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Unfortunately, from her comments on the original post (they’re pretty hard to find because she kept changing her username), she hasn’t grown that much.

          Over about 8-10 comments, it comes out that the “bullying she can’t even remember” was convincing her entire friend group (which up until that point had included Rockstar) to ostracize her. Further, when she found out Rockstar was throwing a party, she threw her own party on the same day so that Rockstar would see all her former-friends hanging out at the party across the street.

          But yeah, she has no idea why Rockstar might think she’d been bullied.

          1. ferrina*

            Ooh, I hadn’t read the comments. I thought it was a case where she had genuinely forgotten (as the saying goes, “The axe forgets; the tree remembers”).

            But relaying that and denying it was bullying? Yeah, guess she hadn’t changed that much.

          2. Ultimate Facepalm*

            This is exactly why I enjoy re-reading OP’s post and her updates. She wasn’t ever really sorry, she was minimizing what she did, she absolutely bullied Rock Star, and RS came out on top. It makes me happy.

          3. Pocket Mouse*

            Honestly, knowing these details about the high school bullying makes the LW’s perspective as of the update click into place for me. Rock Star didn’t live her best life and protect herself and share mental health resources *at* LW, but LW had at one point thrown a party—something typically done for your own enjoyment and not to hurt someone else—*at* Rock Star. From firsthand knowledge that it was possible to do relatively everyday things *at* another person and actually harm them by doing it, LW assumes other people are doing to her what she knows is possible and has herself done to others…. she just doesn’t realize or want to acknowledge that the vast majority of people don’t operate that way, because it’s less painful to think of one’s situation as a result of external forces rather than one’s own actions.

            I really hope LW is in a better place and has worked on becoming a better person since her update.

          4. AcademiaNut*

            There was also a comment that the Rockstar ran away from home as a result of the bullying, and had lived with relatives in another city for a while, but came back to town for the last year or so of high school.

            That pushes it from “I was kind of crappy to a classmate but it was normal teenage crap” to the kind of bullying that leads someone to post PSAs about suicide ten years later.

            I’ve seen a couple of posts from un-self-aware former bullies/jerks who assumed that because their victim had a decent life some years after the fact, it couldn’t have been that bad. Not realizing that it could have been that bad, or worse, and they spent the intervening 10 years working their way through the consequences to get to a better place, and still not want to work with the person who hurt them so badly in the past.

        2. Mobius 1*

          >and the cheating boyfriend

          The part where she said “I’m sure you can guess where this is going”…uh maybe it’s my autism but no I can safely say I had absolutely no idea. Guess that tells you how hangdog she was already feeling going in.

    2. learnedthehardway*

      I felt somewhat badly for her, but the lack of recognition that she had caused her own downfall was grating. She accosted Rock Star at a restaurant and told her that RS had ruined her life. I mean, NO, she had ruined her own life.

      That would have been the perfect time to say, “I wasn’t going to look you up and apologize, because it would have looked self-serving, but I am very sorry for the way I treated you in high school, and I hope you will forgive me.” And then just left it at that.

      1. Lacey*

        Yeah, yelling the RS in the restaurant made me think the OP still has a lot to work through.
        And hopefully she was able to.

        1. Crystal Claire*

          All things considered, I really hope that OP has made a turnaround and would be nice enough to send us another update.

      2. Ess Ess*

        Agreed. It felt like the universe gave her the opportunity to make the apology without looking like she’d tracked RockStar down and instead she again attacked everyone around her.

        It was wrong of her bf to cheat, but if she was crying on the phone to him every night it would have been an exhausting and draining relationship.

      3. The Bill Murray Disagreement*

        While her behavior toward the Rock Star in high school and at the restaurant is indefensible, that OP did not ruin her own life and it’s really unfair to her to portray it that way. She found a job in the field she wanted in a far-away city, didn’t enjoy being far away from her family and her boyfriend, had her boyfriend cancel a trip to see her and when she went home, discovered her boyfriend was cheating on her. None of those things (which is what that OP was considering a ruined life) were her fault. Was her decision to get drunk and yell at Rock Star a good one? Absolutely not. But the direction her life had gone arose from a set of circumstances that could happen to anyone, irrespective of how nicely they’ve treated people around them or not.

        1. Zweisatz*

          Uh, the need to look for that job in a faraway city quite directly followed from her bullying the rockstar employee in highschool. From what I gather she had the qualifications to start at that company, but they went with keeping the rock star employee they knew.

          Does that mean LW is responsible for her cheating boyfriend? Of course not! But her work troubles are quite directly related to her earlier behavior and somehow she still chose to put the responsibility for that at the feet of her former victim instead of looking within and accepting her own role in what transpired.

          I wish her well but more than that I hope she has stopped spinning rock star as the villain in her life story.

    3. I might be mistaken, though*

      I believe there were several follow-ups, where she let people know that she was in therapy and starting her life over.

        1. New Jack Karyn*

          I really want a fresh update from her! I hope she’s staying healthy and doing well. She really took a beating in the first comment section (and she HAD behaved badly), but then made solid moves toward getting better.

    4. Belle of the Midwest*

      I’ve thought about her from time to time over the years (the letter and update were in 2017) and hope that she found a way to move on and get a fresh start. But most of all I hope she’s learned to take responsibility for her own actions and consequences. She was still blaming Rockstar for why she had to move for a job, why she lost her boyfriend, why she lost the job she moved for, and why she was iced out of the whole career field.

      That said, we’ve been through COVID and all kinds of wild and crazy things in the working world since then. I hope she will write in with a much happier update.

  5. Pineapple*

    Many years ago, I was helping out with grad student recruiting for my department at a university by walking students to their various interviews and giving them a little tour of the department. One applicant I was assigned to walk had competed in the Olympics and won a gold medal in his sport, but had to retire due to a shoulder injury, so he decided to go back to school.

    As luck would have it, I happened to have the SAME shoulder injury and we got to talking about our experience having surgery. For some reason I launched into this long winded story about how I’d bought a pineapple while I was recovering “and that was a mistake” and I could. Not. Stop. Talking. About my struggles trying to cut a stupid pineapple on-handed. To an Olympic gold medalist.

    He ended up in our program and he was always very nice to me, but I always cringed talking to him thinking about the 10 minutes I spent talking about the damn pineapple.

    1. Peanut Hamper*

      Somehow I picture him thinking “Oh, it’s that pineapple lady” every time he saw you on campus.

        1. Ali + Nino*

          There are worse things but I totally understand how you feel – I somehow feel I would have done the same thing, lol

        3. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

          If the worst thing you are known for is a weird anecdote about pineapples, you’re fine. :)

      1. Cyndi*

        Yeah, all this did was instantly remind me that after I dislocated my shoulder, I somehow decided a great way to cheer myself up would be to make brownies. Which involved a lot of stirring of stiff brownie batter. With my non-functional right arm.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          I think all of us who have ever had a new disability (temporary or not) have had that “Oh man, I did not think this through” moment. Like me bringing a pair of shoes to dance class, not realizing the ankle strap would go right over my bruise from tripping over a box.

          1. Zelda*

            The Yarn Harlot once compiled lists of “Things it is easy to do with one hand,” “Things it is possible to do with one hand if you are willing to be really patient and accept compromises,” “Things that are surprisingly difficult to do with one hand,” and “Things that are absolutely (&%$#$%&ing impossible.” (All from the perspective of someone who is accustomed to having two fully-functioning hands.)

            1. Arrietty*

              Roald Dahl’s father, who was missing either a hand or several fingers for reasons I don’t recall, found the only thing he couldn’t do with one hand was slice the top off a hard boiled egg. Which isn’t something I’ve ever tried to do with two hands!

                3. iglwif*

                  … how do other people eat them?

                  (Canadians definitely use an egg cup in the manner you describe.)

          2. Chirpy*

            I sprained my knee once and decided biking would be better than walking on it…

            …have you ever thought about how much your knee has to bend while biking?? It was not good.

    3. zinzarin*

      Maybe your memory includes vivid recollections of him cringing while you spoke, but if it doesn’t, I’d reframe this. Absent specific evidence that he was annoyed by you, I would assume that he wasn’t annoyed!

      The pineapple story is a lovely and innocuous anecdote; I think you can let this private shame go. :)

      1. Great Frogs of Literature*

        Yeah, I could absolutely see him thinking, “Oh hey, it’s Pineapple Shoulder-Injury buddy!” kind of fondly when he saw you.

        I can easily imagine a ten-minute pineapple misadventure story funny enough to laugh so hard you cry, and while I we have no evidence that this is that sort of story, it’s a decent setup.

    4. sb51*

      Even if it was a bit silly, it was probably way nicer for him to just listen to you ramble than answering the same 10 questions about the Olympics everyone else has!

    5. Jaydee*

      I’m assuming it wasn’t a story attempting to compare your pineapple cutting hardship with his experience of ending his athletic career due to his injury. So I feel like it’s fine and possibly endearing if it was just an overly long story about the humorous cascade of ridiculous ways you tried to cut a pineapple one-handed. “…so *then* I put it in a bowl, but I couldn’t get the knife at the right angle, so finally I ended up putting bath towels on the floor and sitting on them with the pineapple held between my feet – which yes, I had washed right before I did this – and that was how I got the pineapple cut.”

    6. Stretchy McGillicuddy*

      You just jarred out of me a memory that I had up until now managed to repress. I was at a party and started talking to my friend, her roommate, and her roommate’s fiance. At the time I had just joined a triathlon team because I was horribly out of shape and wanted to exercise. I don’t want to say EVERYONE who just signed up for their first triathlon is annoying…but if that is a stereotype, then I was the reason for it. How are you, you ask? Let me tell you about rhythmic breathing, have you heard of it? I have. Cause I do triathlons.

      Friend’s roommate’s fiance asked me how I was liking the swimming portion and said he was also training for a race. Naturally I spend the rest of the night giving him swimming tips. I even offered to train him. Friends, the race he was training for was the Olympic trials. And yes, he qualified. Surprisingly, he never did take me up on the offer to coach him. Nor did he accept my friend request on Facebook.

      1. GreenGirl*

        We should have a reader response on “when did you/someone else try to teach an expert when you were a beginner?”

        1. iglwif*

          We TOTALLY should!!

          I could contribute the time I, slightly tipsy off a single glass of wine at a work dinner, attempted to explain the history of voter behaviour in our mutual home province to a historian.

      2. Expelliarmus*

        You don’t have to say who the swimmer was, but what Olympic year was he trying out for, if you don’t mind me asking?

    7. rebelwithmouseyhair*

      Pineapple, if it’s any consolation:
      A couple we are friendly with split up and sold their house… to an actual, real rock star who was wanting to hunker down in a quiet suburb where his wife and kids could live an ordinary life while he rockstarred wherever. It turned out there was a cat who had given birth to kittens at the bottom of the garden, my friends told me the new owners would be delighted if someone could adopt a kitten. So I swung by and got one of their kittens.
      The kitten then lived a very chequered life including living under the neighbour’s shed until she was slightly less terrified, getting kidnapped and taken for two months to Portugal, being brought back by the unashamed kidnapper because she couldn’t afford to sterilise her and her tomcat was far too interested in her, getting pregnant as a teenager, giving birth on my son’s bed, going off gallivanting with her love while her kittens were still exclusively breastfed and managing to get pregnant again, then thankfully not getting pregnant a third time so I had a chance to sterilise her, then getting an infection in the wound while we were away on holiday, and finally disappearing for good exactly one year after she was first kidnapped.
      I met the rock star at a local fete, and started recounting the tale of the kitten I’d relieved them of, but he obviously wasn’t a cat person and was not interested and I could not shut up. I am still mortified and avoid him like the plague any time he turns up somewhere.

  6. Oops*

    In college I applied for a part time job at a slightly higher end retail shop. The store mmanager interviewed me. She asked about my goals and for some reason I was honest about not wanting to work in retail forever. (I barely avoided using the word stuck!!!!) It was like I had lost control of my body & mouth but my brain was still in there trying and failing to slam on the brakes. She politely asked for clarification and I stomped on the accelerator and said that I had an exciting career in front of me using my degree, and that I didn’t want to “just” do retail. She was gracious about my poorly hidden (and long since corrected) judgment of retail careers. Somehow I was offered the job, but I was so embarrassed I made up a fake internship and declined the offer. I ended up getting a way worse part time job and never shopping at that store again.

    1. Mobius 1*

      This sort of reminds me of the time I interviewed for a position at an Apple Store a gazillion years ago. As part of the interview, they asked me about an astronomy post-undergrad fellowship I’d done. The beginning of my reply to that will haunt me til the end of my days: “So, I assume you’re familiar with the basics of star formation?” Frankly I have no idea why I wasn’t shown the door immediately thereafter. How I ever thought that that kind of an answer would show that I was the kind of person they’d want out on the floor answering people’s technology questions, I will never know.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        Oh noooo.

        I even understand where that’s probably coming from – there’s the idea in a lot of academia and at least in astronomy (I have a PhD in the field so I know where I’m coming from) that the polite thing to do is to assume your listeners have a lot of background knowledge – that asking people who DON’T in fact have a familiarity with the basics of star formation to speak up is somehow more polite than running through the basics for people who do. But it’s definitely a bad look outside that context and often even within it!

        (I have good luck as someone in a very technical role speaking to mixed audiences with saying “I apologize if this is review for some of you, but just want to make sure we’re all starting from the same place” and then going over the basics.)

      2. ferrina*

        Nah, that wouldn’t seem out of place to me. Doing a quick check to understand your audience’s knowledge base is a good way to start. Yeah, you could have phrased that better, but I’ve seen a lot of people answer this kind of question much, much worse.

        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          As an avid reader and watcher of documentaries, I think a lot of people would be surprised at what basics people do and don’t know.

          I kind of like the way it’s phrased. Like the basics of star formation are just general knowledge for a lot of people.

    2. DancingThruLife*

      I had something similar! (Though I don’t remember a “couldn’t stop” element, just a “whyyyy?”) I got a job teaching abroad the year after I graduated college. The position didn’t start til October, though, so I figured I should try to get a job for the 4 months in between. For whatever reason I wasn’t looking at food service/retail, but a front desk position at a ballroom dance studio opened up. This would be perfect, I thought, because I was a competitive ballroom dancer in college! I was advised NOT to tell them I’d be moving to Europe in October and had fully intended not to, but there came an awkward moment in the interview where, I can’t remember what the interviewer actually asked me, but the vibe I got from the question was “this has nothing to do with your recently acquired degree, what are your actual ambitions in life?” (It might have been a 5-year plan question.) So I felt self-conscious that it didn’t seem like I had my life together and decided to share about this teaching position I’d be taking in October…to no one’s surprise, I didn’t get the job! It was the biggest facepalm moment, but I was feeling so judged and just didn’t know what to do!

    3. Bitte Meddler*

      I worked fast food from age 14 to 17, then retail clothing from 17-19.

      The summer between my 19th and 20th birthdays, I moved to a tiny town with my military then-boyfriend. I interviewed at the local Target for an associate position but somewhere in the interview I decided that I was actually management material and started to tell the interviewer all the reasons why I deserved to be at *least* an assistant manager.

      They were not hiring for an assistant manager.

      And, if they were, they sure as heck weren’t hiring *me* for an assistant manager position.

      I ended up getting a job at an old-timey pharmacy that sold penny candy and gifts, and had a non-electric cash register. It was owned by the pharmacist and the retail space had been built around his parents’ house (his dad had started the pharmacy) so when you went to “the back” to go find something, you’d be wandering in a normal-ish warehouse / back stock area, turn a corner, and find yourself in a living room. Or a bathroom. Or the old kitchen.

      So it worked out for me in the end but — egad — I still cringe all these decades later thinking about that Target interview.

  7. MJ*

    Class discussion and boy was really digging hard. One of the other students piped up ‘let go of the spade’. So good.

    1. Peanut Hamper*

      As the teacher, I could not have resisted laughing out loud at that one. That’s great!

    2. Oldsbone*

      My usual response in that situation is “Would you like some ketchup for your other foot?”

  8. CubeFarmer*

    Well, I hope the bullying LW is in a much, much better place five years later, but for me her letter was delicious, delicious karma.

    I feel like, if she could have moved on from that situation in a meaningful way, this could become one of those “life lessons,” but if she’s still blaming Rock Star for her issues (which, hmmm, ultimately she started because she was a terrible person,) then I hope the best for her.

    1. CubeFarmer*

      Wait…seven years later! Whew, good thing Mr. No Mistakes doesn’t read these comments.

        1. ImprobableSpork*

          I doubt someone with Mr No Mistakes’s level of self-awareness would write to AAM in the first place.

          2. LizardOfOz*

            I can believe he did – he wasn’t looking for advice (because he obviously never made a single mistake, so how could he need advice), he was looking for validation.

            As has been the case with a number of LW in the same situation over the years, he did not quite get the response he wanted. if he had a bit more of an open mind, he might have noticed he got the response he needed, but you know how the saying goes about horses and water.

    2. Peanut Hamper*

      I do hope she is okay. Out of all the people I’ve read about on this blog, she is the one that I think of the most often.

    3. Sugarplum Swan*

      Yes, I always thought that her two letters to AAM should be printed out, enlarged and posted on every middle-school and high-school guidance counselors’ bulletin boards right outside their doors! This is what happens to bullies, folks – do you want it to happen to YOU?

      But bullies do grow up and some even grow out of their bullying ways, so there’s certainly hope for that LW. That being said, growth isn’t always fun or easy; it can involve taking a very hard look at yourself, recognizing what you’ve done wrong, taking responsibility for it, and beginning the difficult, painful work of rebuilding yourself into a decent human being. Let’s hope that the LW in that letter eventually chose to do just that – clearly, clinging to her old, dysfunctional ways wasn’t working out for her on either the professional or the personal level. Sometimes life gives us a hard smack in the face just to wake us up!

    4. Mobius 1*

      At least the timeline is such that she might have had some time to get her emotional feet under her before the lockdowns hit.

    5. Orv*

      Agreed. I was bullied really badly in middle school and to this day I refuse to go to reunions or even to places where I might bump into some of those people. If I saw them in a crosswalk, I’d step on the brake, but there would be a moment where I questioned that decision.

      1. ICodeForFood*

        My sentiments exactly… I’m sure some of my bullies turned into decent people when they grew up, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend any time with them.

      2. Chirpy*

        My middle school bully was an adult, who got all the boys to join in. Most of the boys were probably doing it out of self preservation and I hope they grew up, but that teacher was beyond hope and I honestly don’t know what I’d do if I ever saw him again. Luckily I never did.

    6. Anon for this*

      You’re first sentence is not about karma; it’s about revenge. For me, seeing someone drowning is not the time to tell them they should have learned to swim. Let’s just say, for me, I keep an eye on where my bully is and am not surprised when I see her typical behavior pop up. But it would be pretty gross of me to revel in her complete and utter mental breakdown.

      1. Barm Brack*

        Karma in the sense that there were intentional actions, and those actions have consequences, which is what I’ve been taught karma is (I’m a Zen Buddhist). Consequences can be subtle or loud, they may be immediate or far, far in the future, but they’re there.

        1. Lana Kane*

          But should karma be described as delicious? Karma being cause-and-effect, it seems to me that relishing in how karma plays out for someone doesn’t sound great.

          1. Expelliarmus*

            Sure, it’s not the most morally correct thing, but it’s like a guilty pleasure of sorts.

        2. rebelwithmouseyhair*

          Karma is more a matter of reincarnating as the person you deserve to be in your next life than having petty things happen to you in this. “Delicious karma” is actually Schadenfreude.

      2. Orv*

        My experience is bullies interpret kindness as weakness, so for me the question isn’t about karma or revenge, it’s “would this person extend me the same level of courtesy and caring?” If my history with them indicates the answer is “no,” extending it to them just lets them take advantage of me again.

        1. allathian*

          Yes, I generally favor taking the high road but there are limits. I have absolutely no sympathy for the bully in this story, and frankly I’m not holding out any hope for her ever learning the hard lessons from this one. The rock star being able to stop her getting employed at her company and icing her out of the small field altogether had my schadenfreude meter up at 11. Frankly she deserved nothing less.

      3. Reebee*

        You sure?

        I could several situations where karma is not only delicious, but DEE – LISH. As an example, see the Lori Drew situation.

  9. Viki*

    There was a guy who had been with the company for ~15 years, but had never gotten further than a CSR in the call centre (entry level). A lot of it was his personality, he was always a victim, and cruel if you fell out of favour-very gossipy. The type that couldn’t be racist because he was dating an Asian man.

    The company was hot desking, but he had a special accommodation so he had his own desk, with a specific keyboard. No problem, very fine. But one of the things that had to be followed, was a clean desk policy. No personal affects. The cleaner would refuse to clean desks, if you had things on it.

    He had been warned about this a few times, with his previous managers that his ever growing collection of Royal Family Funko Pops was not allowed (I believe he had just gotten the Meghan Markle one, but cannot remember). But he had no consequences.

    Finally he got a manager who had been at the company longer, had a no nonsense manner, and told him that his Funko Pops had to be gone by the end of the week. He ignored her. Monday morning, those Funko Pops were off his desk (in a bin in a closet), and he was written up for being insubordinate.

    It was insane. He was ranting about her horribly, demanded his things back. He got them back, and then put them up again.

    Same thing happened. This time, he actively was telling other reps his manager was derogatory things.

    His manager took him in a room, with HR, and the SM, to tell him it wasn’t appropriate and this was a written warning, with the next step of termination.

    He called her a “f-ing C-t, whose not the boss of him.”

    All because he couldn’t stand to not have his Funko Pops displayed.

    1. CubeFarmer*

      I hope that he was marched out of the office immediately? Probably not. Every office seems to have someone who never seems to have consequences applied to their actions.

        2. Sharpie*

          “You’re not the boss of me!”

          “… Well, not now, I’m not. You’re fired.”

          “…”

    2. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      I feel like it’s much more of a deeper issue with authority, than just displaying the Funko Pops. That’s just the iceberg you can see above the water.

      1. Viki*

        Oh clearly, for sure.

        But, as just another CSR at that time, it was just this guy who wouldn’t follow the clear desk policy

      2. Hot Flash Gordon*

        Yeah, I have a feeling he does not do well with being told what to do. I know several people like this and life is difficult for them unless they own their own business.

    3. Peanut Hamper*

      Adds note to calendar: “Today I found out that Funko Pops of the Royal Family was the hill someone was willing to die on.”

      2. Sharpie*

        Today I found out that there are Funko Pops of the Royal Family.

        …I really should not be surprised by the existence of such a thing. There are Funko Pops of everything!

        1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

          And custom ones too. I have Funko Pops of me and my husband, with my two dogs and his two cats, that friends of ours got us for Christmas (and modified further, as one of the friends is a miniatures painter), on display in my living room.

        2. Diana*

          They are fun, though they’re kinda top heavy and tip over. QEII’s comes with a tiny corgi!

        3. Ally McBeal*

          Oh and the Megan Markle one is going to be quite the collector’s item – I imagine they may not be making them anymore now that she and Harry have left The Firm.

        1. La Triviata*

          Years ago, having moved into a new office, our CEO had a meeting with some department heads and one item that came up was about displaying personal items. We had not-quite cubicles – short dividers with shelf-like tops. The CEO made it clear that no one should have personal items on the tops. They came out of the meeting and the CEO’s assistant had all her divider tops covered with little cute items. One of the department heads doubled up with laughter; everyone else – including the assistant – laughed, since she’d done it as a joke. The assistant then moved the personal items to her desk top to be less conspicuous.

      2. Wendy Darling*

        I feel like having someone say you are not the boss of them when you are literally the boss of them and then getting to fire them for it must be one of the most satisfying experiences ever.

    5. Csethiro Ceredin*

      My friend’s ex used that exact phrasing on the judge for their custody case.

      He’d made up all these lies about how my friend was crazy and accusing him of abuse out of spite, and doing a reasonably good job of appearing to be A Very Professional, Plausible Man Who Stayed Calm While She Got Upset.

      Then he drew a female judge and screamed that at her the first time she challenged him… he did not win the case.

      1. Slightly Less Evil BunnyI*

        Ahh. To quote “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle”: In the end, the universe tends to unfold as it should.

      2. Paint N Drip*

        as much as I love the ‘gotcha’ for your friend, people like this really scare me :( I guess it’s the neurodivergence and generally not being believed or sided with, but the fact that some people are SO good at manipulation that they make stable people look crazy just makes me fear rigid processes like the legal system

  10. Peanut Hamper*

    We hired someone to work in QC at my last job who simply refused to do the required training. I kept pressing him (because it was my job) and he kept saying he’d been in QC for years and didn’t need to be trained. (FWIW, the training was required as part of our corporate certification.) He did a simple calibration task, I reviewed his work, and as it turned out he did it incorrectly, missing one of the key points included in the training. He then complained it was because that was how they did it at his old job and nobody had trained him how to do it here.

    Lather, rinse, repeat.

    We eventually let him go and paid out all his PTO. He then called to complain because they paid out several weeks in one check and said that he would be in a higher tax bracket as a result and they would take too much out in withholding. I had to repeatedly explain to him that that is not how they calculate taxes when they pay out a lump sum like that.

    By the time I finally got off the phone with him, I finally realized he was right about one thing: he was definitely in a different tax bracket now.

  11. Nobody home*

    I’ll admit, every now and then I think about that first letter and wonder if they ever got the help they needed.

    1. ScruffyInternHerder*

      Same here. The LW was so obviously hurting, and making self-destructive moves to the point where I’d bet they needed to completely change industries, and seemed almost to the point of understanding “yeah this was actually all due to my behavior NOW, not because of some imagined black-ball from someone I used to pick on in high school”.

      1. Observer*

        seemed almost to the point of understanding “yeah this was actually all due to my behavior NOW, not because of some imagined black-ball from someone I used to pick on in high school”.

        To me, the saddest part was that they were nowhere *near* that point.

        Look at what she describes:

        She got drunk at a restaurant and “ended up” creating such a bad scene that she was banned from the restaurant, but she describes it much more muted terms.

        She can’t help but feel that *Rockstar* is to blame, not *her own* egregious behavior.

        And again, blaming Rockstar who must be “rubbing it in” by posting to social media without ever mentioning the LW.

        1. ScruffyInternHerder*

          Hopefully seven years later they’ve realized that they were waaaaay off base.

          It seemed like they were a clear eyed read from it, but they needed to do serious work to get to that clear eyed self.

          1. Maleficent*

            Some people just aren’t capable of getting to that point. It’s been over 10 years since I divorced my lazy and immature ex husband for having multiple affairs, spanning almost the entire time we were married. He still insists that everything that’s gone wrong in his life since then is because I “just suddenly left him”, and he has “no idea what he did to deserve it”.

            1. N C Kiddle*

              Sounds a lot like my mum. Her marriage to my dad broke down because my dad “didn’t appreciate her” and his best friend was “lonely and needed a friend” and although my dad tried to overlook the first time they slept together, the second time he said enough. And the reason their divorce was so acrimonious had nothing to do with her signing documents and then claiming to have misunderstood them, or in fact the whole affair with his best friend thing, but entirely down to his lawyer being spiteful. I’m sure she has similar excuses for why three of her children avoid her as much as possible.

      1. So they all cheap-ass rolled over and one fell out*

        The LW’s life was so thoroughly ruined that it was hard for me to enjoy their comuppance, whether they deserved it or not.

        1. Another Jen*

          Exactly. And it contrasted perfectly with how well her former victim’s life seemed to be going.

  13. Snarkus Aurelius*

    I worked for a horrible boss who had challenges with social interactions. (He had no conversational impulse control.)

    He was trying to eliminate telework completely even if there were ADA accommodations! I didn’t think he was actually going to do it because he was full of bluster and insecurity.

    Oh he did, and then employees began to anonymously post about it online and one of them got an attorney so I had to talk to him about it.

    Me: did you ask employees for their medical records?

    Boss: no I never did that. I asked for medical documentation *beyond* the ADA accommodation so I could determine if they had a legitimate condition.

    Me: you can’t do that, and it’s crazy illegal.

    Boss: no it’s not! You’re not a lawyer. Anyone can get a doctor to sign anything, and I’m not stupid. Just saying you need telework as an accommodation doesn’t mean I have to grant it.[Note: he is correct.]

    Me: I understand that, but these people had telework for ADA accommodations *already* with no performance issues. You scrutinizing them now *because of their disability* and basing your approval on explicit medical information are forms of discrimination.

    Boss: no it’s not! All I’m doing is asking people to tell me what their disability is and why it requires telework so that I can determine if that’s a legitimate disability. If I don’t think it is, then they have to come in to work like everyone else. I don’t need to see their medical records to know their telework accommodations aren’t needed anyway. They’re lying!

    Me: that’s literally the definition of discrimination and invasion of privacy.

    Boss: no it’s not because I have good intentions. I would never share their medical information. I just need to know if they’re really disabled.

    This garbage continued for 20 more minutes. I didn’t change his mind, but a threatening letter from a disability lawyer did!

    1. GreenGirl*

      “no it’s not because I have good intentions.”

      Could you hear my faceplam through the computer?

      2. Snarkus Aurelius*

        I found out later he thought the ADA was for making sure people who used wheelchairs weren’t shut out of the workforce.

        I mean…that’s true in the same way Animal Farm is about talking animals.

      1. Snarkus Aurelius*

        Right?

        I don’t need to be a lawyer to understand and correctly identify the word “discrimination.”

        As someone who has an ADA accommodation, which he didn’t know because my disability isn’t obvious, I was not comforted at all.

    4. M2RB*

      I heard similar comments from a person in charge of HR regarding an employee’s pregnancy – HR person’s comments could not be considered discriminatory because THEY did not have bad intentions… Reader, it was clearly discriminatory, and I have documentation ready in case the pregnant employee ever needs it.

    6. The Unionizer Bunny*

      Anyone can get a doctor to sign anything,

      This is the kind of moment where it would be nice to fall under the FMLA: tell that employer “You can force me to go to other doctors for a second and even third opinion, but you have to locate the doctors and you have to pay for it.” – once they’re staring a medical bill unmitigated by insurance in the face, they have reason to change their mind. Especially if the accommodation itself is much cheaper.

    7. The Unionizer Bunny*

      Anyone can get a doctor to sign anything,

      Turns out it’s not just for the FMLA:
      https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-disability-related-inquiries-and-medical-examinations-employees#7

      Check every instance of the word “insufficient” on that page. That document does not specify that the employer must pay for other medical providers, but this one does:
      https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/health-care-workers-and-americans-disabilities-act

      If the individual requesting accommodation is unable to provide sufficient documentation, the employer may ask the employee to take a medical examination by a physician of the employer’s choice at the employer’s expense.

      Employers may find “you can force the employee to get a second opinion, but it will cost more than the accommodation would have and you may still have to grant the accommodation anyway” intimidating enough to back down even before you shell out for an attorney to write a letter.

  14. Fluffy Fish*

    Preface: I work in a field where experience is (currently) more valuable than a degree; This individual was hired and worked for someone who was also “a problem”. I did not work for him but worked adjacent and have worked here 4ever.

    New guy was hired with no experience but a degree in the field. He was previously military and had no real office work experience. He lasted maybe 2/3 months. During that time it was obvious that everything he thought abotu working in an office was based on tv shows.

    He:

    -Routinely disappeared from his office to go work else where. Like the picnic table outside. This wasnt a thing, you more or less were expected to be found in your office.
    -On one such jaunt he took confidential documents off-site to a fast food restaurant for “someone” with “writing experience” to review. Turned out to be his mommy.
    -When gently cautioned he should check before showing documents to random people, he mansplained FOIA to me (we’re not the feds so FOIA doesn’t apply and the laws that do apply have exemptions for these types of documents)
    -In general bristled at any and all feedback because he “had a degree”
    -Was told he could move his computer at his u shaped desk if he’d like. Somehow heard he could rearrange his whole office. The furniture is super big for the space and rearranging it wasn’t a thing. He got mad.
    -Couldnt get onto a secure location – attempted anyway and got turned away (his boss was complicit and present for this)
    – In general where was his boss? Being incompetent elsewhere. And telling him things like he didn’t have to listen to anyone else if he didn’t want to.
    – In a final act of defiance (dear readers he did not know it would be final), he came to work in a government office wearing a shirt that said “Straight out of f–ks” – obviously directed at all of us who were gently trying to give him the guidance that is typical of sharing when a new employee is on board.
    -When called out about the shirt he claimed he meant to put a shirt over it and forgot. Then proceeded to show photos with his small child at a concert in an attempt to demonstrate it was no big deal.

    Needless to say he got fired. BUT that’s not all friends:
    -He tried to start a consulting business in the field. Why he thought anyone would hire someone with zero experience beats me.
    -He lists on his linkedin that he held the Directors position for the 3 months he worked for us.
    – Apparently his children go to a colleagues kids school. He was witnessed stopping his car in the road, getting out and escorting his children across the street to the school, blissfully blocking traffic.
    -Apparently he’s now in school for nursing. I would immediately request a new nurse.

    1. Sugar Swan*

      How was ANY of this kind of behavior tolerated in the military? Or did he get kicked out of that as well??

        2. H.C.*

          Wow, how did he explain his way through that during the hiring phase? An OTH would’ve raised a HUGE eyebrow for me.

          1. New Jack Karyn*

            Yeah, you gotta be a worse than average fuck-up to get OTH. That’s not, like, averaging 4.1 out of 5 on your annual review.

          2. Chauncy Gardener*

            Right? People need to understand that anything other than honorable is NOT GOOD

            1. H.C.*

              Yeah, in my mind that’s like skirting by with a D- on a report card as opposed to a F (dishonorable discharge); yeah technically you “passed” but I would have serious doubts you can handle whatever’s next.

          3. Fluffy Fish*

            His boss. He was ex-military and thought the sun shined out of anyone military’s behind. Not shading military, just this particular guy put a lot of weight on it while disregarding other things.

            Like the guy he hired that did.not.talk. for a role that requires an enormous amount of collaboration. He also isn’t employed here anymore and his story AND the bosses would be their own tales in this thread.

            Anyway, he was no longer allowed to hire without oversight after this guy.

            1. H.C.*

              Yikes, though I would think as a vet he would be extra aware of the implications behind an OTH discharge. That being said, I also know folks who thinks any ex-military can do no wrong since they have “served”, no matter how they were discharged from service – even dishonorably!

    2. Wendy*

      A former manager of mine back in 2013 came from the military

      We both worked for Central Parking at a client site managed by our former employer

      He was a Facility Manager

      I was a porter who cleaned 2 garages

      The client site we both worked at had roughly 10 parking garages and 3 parking lots

      We both worked Monday through Friday 40 hours a week

      There were 3 Facility managers, a Senior Facility manager over the entire operation, and office staff that had a physical inbox located at the garage office that the hourly employees clocked in at

      Any paperwork for these employees went into the individual inboxes

      The porters had to fill out a daily maintenance checklist 5 days a week, and that checklist went into the inbox for the Facility Manager over the garage you were assigned to

      I noticed that the Facility Manager I reported to… his inbox was full every day

      Once a month there was a safety meeting

      The manager I reported to chose to be in charge of the safety meeting that took place the month after he started working there

      The 2 other Facility managers and the porter staff were at that meeting

      He told all of us the following during the safety meeting… I do not have time to check my inbox every day… My office is too far from the garage office, and I do not want to drive back and forth from that garage office to my office 5 days a week… If you have anything to give to me please call me to let me know and drop it off at my office

      He was the only employee requesting that

      He lasted less than 45 days with our former employer

      1. Fluffy Fish*

        Always fascinated by people who simply refuse to do an essential part of their job and are always somehow surprised/indignant that it is in fact a problem.

        1. Ally McBeal*

          In college, the theatre box office where I did my work-study program upgraded to a new ticketing software program when I was two semesters in. I had a peer, who had been there as long as I had, who flat-out refused to learn the new program. For some reason our manager declined to fire him despite our complaints, so for a full semester he would sit in the back – while the rest of us were frantically manning the sales windows – to pick up phone calls and take messages on post-it notes (because he refused to even learn how to put those messages into the software program). What did he do with the rest of his shift, you ask? He read his bible. He said he was studying to become a preacher. My school did not have a theology program or seminary, and frankly the Christian portion of the Religious Studies department was severely lacking.

          I don’t know if he quit or my manager told the work-study office not to rehire him for the next semester, but I never saw him again and heard through the grapevine that he’s in insurance sales now.

  15. Blue Spoon*

    My very first job interview was for a fast food restaurant in a mall. The manager interviewed me at a table in the food court, which, combined with my inexperience, must have made the situation feel more casual than it was, because at one point he asked what I did in my spare time and I launched into a longwinded description of a novel idea that I was brainstorming at the time. He tried to move on to other questions, but I’d assumed that the hobby question meant we’d proceeded from the interview into small talk and really wanted to talk more about my novel, so I kept going.

    I didn’t get the job, and only ever wrote like one scene of that novel.

  16. Elsewise*

    I was only peripherally involved in this one (thank goodness). Guy was studying to be a teacher. He did all of the classes, got to the student teaching portion, and something happened while he was student teaching that caused him to get dismissed from that placement. He complained to the university, who launched an investigation, and dropped him from the program. I worked in admissions and had to deal with him calling me (since my number was public) and demanding a refund on his full program. I tried explaining to him that I was definitely not the right department, but he refused to be transferred because “no one else is picking up their phones!”

    It comes out that he’d requested to be reinstated and been denied. He filed an appeal and was denied. He demanded a refund and it was denied. He called the provost repeatedly, but since he was refusing to take no for an answer, she wasn’t picking up his calls anymore. In fact no one in any of the right departments was taking his calls, so he was on to the wrong departments. He kept telling me that nothing he had done “actually counts as illegal”, and he didn’t deserve this treatment. Eventually his number went on the university-wide do not answer list. Last I heard he was trying to sue, but couldn’t find a lawyer to take his case for free because they all wanted to know what he did, which he thought was irrelevant.

      2. Elsewise*

        Me too! We never found out. The general assumption around the office was that it probably involved a student who had just turned 18, but the people at the university who knew weren’t talking.

    5. GreenGirl*

      nothing he had done “actually counts as illegal”

      Which means he can’t be arrested, not that he is entitled to a job, school placement, or anything else.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        Ding ding! The university still doesn’t have to grant you a degree when you don’t complete an element of that degree. And the university is choosing not to align their name with yours when you eventually get on the news, dude!!

    6. Orv*

      That kind of shotgun calling is definitely a thing at universities, because everyone’s phone number is usually public. I’ve had parents call me asking to have their kids’ grades changed. I’m a computer system administrator and can’t change anyone’s grade, and anyway, we can’t discuss grades with parents unless their kid is present, because of FERPA rules.

      I used to interrupt and tell them this immediately, but I’ve learned it works better to let them get their whole rant out first. Usually ranting is 99% of what they want to do anyway.

      1. Zephy*

        +1. I have definitely been subject to tirades of verbal abuse from parents and students, related to things that had bugger-all to do with me, because I happened to be the first person to actually answer my phone that day. There’s one parent that I’ve spoken to multiple times and every time all she wanted to do was rant – the last time we spoke (and Lord willing it will be the last), she had sent me an email while I was out of the office, then called about 10 minutes after I got in the day I returned from vacation. Rather than address the thing she’d emailed me about, which I tried to ask her about six times in 15 minutes, she spent that entire call berating me for not having called her back yet. Ma’am, we’re on the phone *right now.* Do you want an answer to your question, or should I go do something else for half an hour while you get this nonsense out of your system? I tried to follow up with an email outlining the information she (ostensibly) needed and she basically told me to F off.

    7. Tiny Soprano*

      Geez you’ve just triggered a memory of the in person version of your guy! It’s upsetting that there’s two of them.

      Our one had been banned from a local organisation and was going around to every manned desk within an 800m radius to vehemently assert that it wasn’t fair, saying “it wasn’t like I hit anybody.” We are not in any way related to the organisation he was banned from, but it didn’t stop him coming back three times to dig the hole a little deeper by being increasingly obnoxious. He’s probably banned from a bunch of unrelated businesses now too, on top of whatever his original ban was. Ours included.

    8. N C Kiddle*

      “It doesn’t actually count as illegal” sounds like an example of the Suspiciously Specific Denial to me.

      1. Artemesia*

        Yeah that has got to be ‘she was 18’. so technically having sex with my student was not illegal.

  17. Apex Mountain*

    I was thinking of the letter from the woman who was jealous of her attractive employee, and kept sending in updates where the behavior just went from bad to worse, and i believe ended up in a court case at one point.

    1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      I remember that one.

      I also remember the Leap Year Birthday Boss who just.kept.defending. their policy that the employee only had a birthday every four years. Alison and the commenters are telling them how ridiculous and awful they were being, but they just kept going.

      1. A Simple Narwhal*

        Oh geez yea that person just kept digging and digging. It was almost amusing if it wasn’t so nerve-wracking that someone like that was in charge of other people’s careers.

      2. Artemesia*

        This was the worst (not the worst behavior — we save that for things like the boss bullying people to give their liver or showing up to badger the employee about a work project when they are in chemo or at a funeral) but the most clueless. You get your day off Monday if your birthday is on the weekend — but for leap year, nope — you only get a day off every 4 years.

    2. Hlao-roo*

      There were four updates to the “I’m jealous of my employee and it’s impacting how I treat her” letter, and in my opinion the letter-writer’s behavior improved across the updates. The fourth and final update mentions the court case–the LW was convicted but the sentence was suspended “because I had already gone to rehab on my own and settled the lawsuit at the first chance.”

      I’ll link to the fourth update (which has links to the original letter and earlier updates) in a reply to this comment.

      2. MsSolo (UK)*

        Between her, the woman who managed out a staff member who didn’t come on brewery runs with the team and got herself and her whole team fired, and the woman who called her boss’s daughter a whore, there is a solid track record here of people in some of the darkest letters recognising their ‘work’ problem was a them problem and making changes in their life. I really hope the high school bully goes on the same journey some day.

        2. Irish Teacher.*

          Brewery run boss, jealous of my employee boss and woman who bullied Rock Star in high school all seem to me to follow a similar pattern. In each case, the LW frames the problem as being due to a sort of personality conflict with a particular person and in each case, there is some indication that the LW feels the person in question is more successful or better liked than the LW or has some skill or trait that the LW feels makes them look bad by comparison.

          And in each case, it gradually becomes clear that the issues go way beyond the LW’s relationship with the specified person and it seems sort of like they are almost focussing on that person as an explanation for all their problems.

          1. Charlotte Lucas*

            The problem is not being able to accept personal responsibility. (My current manager is like this. Everything is always the fault of another office or vendor or perhaps ghosts. He hasn’t used the last excuse, but it wouldn’t surprise me.)

          2. AcademiaNut*

            The jealousy one was different in that the LW recognized that she was behaving badly, felt terrible about it, but was unable to stop, and was writing in for advice based on that. It’s closer to the one about the woman who anxiety spiralled about not getting a have a nice day from a coworker, opened her pay stub to get her address and went to her home to confront her – she knew she screwed up, but couldn’t stop herself. When things got worse, they recognized they were in the wrong, accepted the consequences and got help.

            The others wrote in because they felt they were treated unfairly, massively minimized their contribution to the situation, and discounted the effects of their behaviour on other people. They go with the guy who ghosted his live in partner by moving out of the country while she was on vacation, and was worried about having her as a superior at his new job, and the woman who demoted a long standing, highly competent employee based on the unfounded complaints of a new hire, and lost her business as a result.

          5. Unkempt Flatware*

            I’m still upset at that one. I’m glad she got out of the community she was in but I felt a false sense of security from her where she seemed to think that just removing herself meant she was free from the burdens and influences she was raised in. She said some really awful things which cannot just be flipped off like a switch. I believe she is going to have many “relapses” so to speak.

            1. New Jack Karyn*

              I feel that, too. A lot of those beliefs are taught from infancy, and can be difficult to even notice in oneself, let alone uninstall.

            2. Mouse*

              Having been raised in a fundamentalist church which I left as an adult, I think there are two kinds of religious bigots: those who use religion as an excuse for their bigoted beliefs; and those who are not inclined to bigotry, but hold bigoted beliefs because that’s what their religion teaches, and they want to do the right thing.

              I used to be homophobic because that’s what my church taught. But I learned better in college, and I left my church in part because I could no longer overlook the homophobia (and sexism, and nationalism, and…). Did my internalized homophobia immediately end, “like a switch”? Of course not. Relearning takes time. I will always be learning. But I welcome the process.

              If you weren’t raised in a cult, you may not appreciate the full meaning of “I am no longer Christian.” That translates roughly to, “I have done the thing I was taught to fear above all else, because I came to the conclusion that everything I was told about the very nature, meaning, and purpose of life and death was a lie. And I won’t go back.”

              From the very terseness of her latest update, I think that LW will probably be ok.

        4. Hlao-roo*

          Yes, I agree that all three updates are great examples of personal growth! For anyone who wants to read the letters/updates MsSolo (UK) referenced, they are:

          Brewery run manager: “is the work environment I’ve created on my team too exclusive?” from July 25, 2017 with updates on August 2, 2017 and October 12, 2017 (note that the letter-writer digs her heels in with the first update and the personal growth happens between the first and second updates)

          Boss’s daughter: “I accidentally insulted my boss’s daughter” from April 19, 2017 with updates on May 3, 2017 and June 10, 2021 (similar to above, more personal growth between the first and second updates than between the letter and first update)

        5. KateM*

          Or the owner who had three employyes and let two new employees to make her fire the oldest one?

          1. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

            Oh, the memory of that still makes me flinch. If I recall correctly, LW’s in-law hired the oldest (and best) employee and LW lost her business due to keeping the ones she’d listened to.

      3. Yet Another Chris*

        I hope that she is still doing well five years later. The pandemic put a lot of people through the wringer, and I hope she was able to navigate that.

      4. Blue Spoon*

        The main thing I remember about that one is feeling a little uncomfortable about how hard she seemed to be leaning on her church in the last couple of updates, but I guess if it worked for her it worked for her.

      1. Apex Mountain*

        You’re right, they were. It was more the way the stories kept escalating in each update

  18. Arden Windermere*

    Early in my career I was interviewing for a position after having just left a bad company (I had to play games to get my paycheck, and then they bounced said check and got mad at me for mentioning it, and I wasn’t allowed to take lunch ever). When talking to the interviewer, she asked me something about what I was looking for in a company and I said “my last job I wasn’t allowed to take lunch, so really, just lunch.” I meant it as a joke, but the interviewer didn’t get my sense of humor and just calmly assured me I’d get to take lunch. I could have just let it go, but I didn’t. I constantly kept bringing up that I wanted lunch as if all of a sudden she would understand that I was being funny – she did not. She even brought me over to the kitchen area to show me that this was where lunches happened and that there was no ban on lunching.

    I did not get that job. I cringe every time I think about it. I have gotten to have lunch at all my jobs since though.

  19. Everlast*

    I was once the interviewer for a position that had many openings for a position, with some of the slots for Spanish bilingual at premium pay. We did the first portion of the interview in English, then I said for the next few questions let’s discuss in Spanish.
    This one applicant for the bilingual position said she was not comfortable doing that because she was out of practice. I was surprised but said, “Well that’s ok we are also hiring for non-bilingual for the same position”. She stated firmly she was only interested in the bilingual position. I said well then let’s do the interview questions in Spanish and I’ll assess the fit. She declined.
    I said “Then the interview is over thanks for coming.” and stood up to walk her out. She said NO let’s continue it.
    I walked her out.

    2. Jen MaHRtini*

      I was once looking for a bilingual manager for a phone room calling IT professionals in non-English speaking countries (mostly France, Spain, Germany & Italy). Once candidate kept insisting that I pass along her resume to the hiring managers because she was fluent in American Sign Language (note, this was before video chat was common, and the people we’d be calling wouldn’t use ASL anyway.)

    4. Arrietty*

      I’m picturing that meme with the dog who won’t let go of the ball. “No Spanish. Only premium.”

    5. Artemesia*

      We always asked a couple of substantive questions in the phone screen when in the process of hiring teaching faculty. We shaped it to the courses we were hiring for and also the person’s background. It would be something broad like, ‘if you were putting together the organizational theory class what are a couple of authors in the field you would want to include?’ and then discuss it with them. Occasionally you get someone with a PhD applying for a teaching position (professorial status but non tenure track ) who says something lie ‘Oh I didn’t prepare, I didn’t know there was going to be a test.’

      Hiring someone to create and teach courses in a program, you sorta want them to know their field well enough to be able to talk about it. Had one guy whom we didn’t put forward in the process, keep begging to be re-considered because he hadn’t prepared for the test. Very weird.

  20. LaurCha*

    Is that the one where the coworker was mad because the letter writer had lost weight due to an illness, and just kept being an asshole, and then showed up at the letter writer’s door with an MLM diet plan to sell her? Because that ish was bonkers

      1. Chauncy Gardener*

        Incredibly satisfying updates!
        But that coworker had dug in so hard, she was practically on the other side of the earth

    3. Observer*

      Oh yes. And the discussion of banana suits, ensembles, and various permutations was great.

      But, yes, that person was digging so hard, that you would have expected her to poke her head out in China.

      1. ScruffyInternHerder*

        Is that when we started using “BananaPants” and variations in the AAM vernacular? Thereabouts?

        1. I strive to Excel*

          I think that letter came not long after we got a comment thread requesting that we not use “crazy” as a descriptor for people whose behavior was, well, bananapants. Someone in that thread suggested bananas/bananapants. Then shortly afterwards the update that came in for the MLM lady started with “hold on to your bananapants”, which seems to have cemented the term.

          1. Chauncy Gardener*

            And this OP could really write! I think a lot of the commentariat weighed in that she should do it for a living. Her writing was totally impressive and REALLY enjoyable to read.

    4. Coffee*

      She assumed that someone had a weight loss surgery and insisted they go to gym right away to make sure she doesn’t gain weight. Even if she had assumed right gym would have been bad idea bro soon after surgery

  21. M2*

    Did we ever get other updates from either of the above? The first ones were written in 2017 and it would be interesting to know if 7 years later things had changed for them.

    Honestly, I had never done anything like digging myself in a hole but went through an awful breakup and moving away (from family friends and boyfriend) was the thing that made everything better. New job, new life, etc. I worked on myself and was able to get away from everything that was pulling me down. I didn’t go home or visit for a year but when I finally went back I had worked on myself and had a new life that none of it mattered anymore! I found out I loved different areas to live. When I first moved I had no money so subletted a room then moved out and moved in with one roommate. I bounced a gym, tried events around the city, joined a soccer league in one of the parks. Whereas at home I hung out with those that I knew and was t going out of my comfort zone meeting new people or growing as a person.

  22. diasporacrew*

    The manager who kept insisting his employee only had a birthday every four years because she was born on leap day comes to mind…

    2. Birthday Boy*

      What gets is that it turned out that if someone’s birthday fell on a weekend, they still had to take off a day anyway! So there was already people having the birthday days off… not on their birthday! All he had to do was ask her ‘hey, for the system we have, do you prefer to take 28th if Feb off or the 1st of march?’ and that’s it! Problem solved! I really hope she left that company

  23. Juicebox Hero*

    The people in charge where I work are notoriously wimpy about addressing problem employees, which has led to some pretty awful people being allowed to stay way way way longer than they should have. This is local government so sexism and factionalism run rampant on top of everything.

    The worst was a former administrative assistant, who thought she was untouchable. She and the finance officer, whose assistant she was, Hated each other. The (female) FO is short-tempered and snarly at the best times, and the AA kept the pot boiling. She and another female coworker were always spreading gossip, starting rumors, trying to get us to refuse to do certain tasks, real grade school mean girl stuff. She figured me for a gormless little wuss and tried to drag me into the mess, but thankfully I only look like one.

    Let’s see, she deliberately broke her office furniture so they’d have to buy her new stuff; broke some pretty serious policies about not speaking to the media; submitted a workman’s comp claim for someone who didn’t even work here – the janitor, who was employed by a cleaning service and not our organization; submitted a lot of work late and/or done incorrectly; hinted around that a new, young department head had gotten his job by doing favors for the guys in charge, and the like. Naturally the FO was ready to go supernova over all this, but she couldn’t do anything without the agreement of the higher-ups who thought AA was just great and couldn’t be bothered to deal with “girl stuff”.

    The last straw finally came when she told FO that she (AA) knew that FO was having an affair with TopGuy. I don’t know what exactly happened, but AA was walked out of the building and FO called the rest of us into private meetings with her to accuse us of conspiring with AA and she’d be keeping a close eye on us. Fortunately she believed me when I said AA tried and failed to get me on her side and that I was sick of her shenanigans.

    Thankfully, AA’s replacement is competent and friendly. FO and I are the only ones here who remember the old AA, but just mentioning her name is enough to get FO furious so I don’t ever talk about her.

    1. Jane*

      1) my head is spinning over the intentional destruction of office furniture
      2) “gormless little wuss” is a wonderful turn of phrase that I am definitely gonna co-opt!

  24. Ally McBeal*

    I worked in higher ed for a while. I was having a casual chat with the HR specialist who worked most frequently with unions; she told me that a male employee – who was also the head of his local union chapter – had been credibly accused of making inappropriate comments to female students, so she’d called him in to discuss it. He basically told her in this meeting that she wasn’t qualified to have this talk with him … because she was wearing sexy clothes … and was clearly hitting on HIM by virtue of wearing said clothes to this meeting.

    I’m pretty sure he was terminated in the end, although I’m not sure he left his union post.

  25. Mobius 1*

    Granted this was from Captain Awkward rather than AAM, but from time to time I think about the woman who wrote in asking how she could get her daughter to marry someone more religious. And then went even more all in in an update. I just have so many questions. Obviously how everyone involved is doing, but also what possessed her to write in to CA of all possible sites? And if she wrote in anywhere else and how that went.

    1. Ama*

      I do enjoy the people who write into advice websites but are so self-centered they either can’t bother to read the website and see if it is a good fit or are so convinced they are right that they think “even though this advice columnist is a big proponent of establishing boundaries with overbearing family members, *I* am so clearly right she will tell me I’m the exception.”

      1. Mobius 1*

        It’s not even that as much as “How the hell is this woman, who is so exactly the opposite of Captain Awkward’s usual readership as to defy belief, aware of it and considering it as somewhere she might write into?”

        1. Roland*

          They probably just google “relationship advice” and see that the site answers letters.

    2. I strive to Excel*

      I think I remember the letter you’re talking about and even the Captain was like “I’m not sure what exactly you thought you were going to get out of writing to me of all people, but here goes”

      1. Mobius 1*

        She did say almost exactly that. I do admire the way she was able to get past that and give compassionate advice.

    4. Feeling Feline*

      That is a wild ride. I thought it was perhaps a parody, until I got to the “we are Chinese” part. My Chinese arse just. Entirely got how believable it is.

  26. WorkerJawn*

    This is relatively light hearted: I had been working in at my job for about a year in an operations role, when one of our sales people came over an introduced himself at an event. I pointed out that we had met a few times before, but I understood where he was coming from since I worked in a different location than him and recently cut off all my hair. I gave him basically every excuse for not knowing the name of someone whose picture popped into his inbox every other week when I sent him materials.

    He thoughtfully looked at me and said “Are you sure? I’m very good with faces.”

    1. A Face in the Crowd*

      I had the opposite experience — a guy came up to me at a bar and mistook me for someone else. I let him know as pleasantly as possible, but he repeatedly insisted that I was his coworker from a government office I’ve never even set foot inside. Wonder if he berated her for pretending not to know him on Monday morning…

      1. H.Regalis*

        My partner had an odd experience like this. He was getting a haircut, and the hairdresser asked him if he knew the mayor of a nearby city because “he looked like he would.” Never figured out what that meant. The hairdresser apparently had major beef with the mayor and spent the whole haircut ranting about that, and then asked my partner again if he was SURE he didn’t know the mayor. So weird.

    3. Pandas*

      Reminds me, from back when I did Meetup: I was introduced to a guy at an event, where I met a lot of other people. When I met him again at a different one, I didn’t remember him and reintroduced myself but he remembered me. He wasn’t offended, that’s normal for Meetup. The third time, we met at a tennis event so he was standing kind of far away with the sun behind him so I didn’t recognize him in time. He was a bit more annoyed. Fourth time, I saw him and thought it would be funny to pretend I didn’t remember again. I thought I was being really obvious about it being a joke, but it wasn’t to him and he actually got offended that time. He didn’t really believe my explanations that I was joking. I realized things were unsalvageable and didn’t try to speak with him at an event again until the pandemic ended all Meetups. Oh well.

  27. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

    My boss (Fergus), we were all in a meeting with his boss (GB) and the Grand Boss’ boss (GGB) there too. Fergus is trying to explain that our department is often caught in the middle of bigger org/office politics that are really impacting us getting our work done — Big Person in Dpt A telling us to do something that majorly conflicts with what Big Person in Dpt B wants and we don’t have any authority to say no to either of them or tell them to figure it out and keep us out of the middle. Fergus is going on and on about us walking a fine line… we’re dancing as fast as we can… we’re on a tightrope… but we’re holding onto a pole for balance… but we keep dancing… we’re pole dancing… graciously the GB finally stops him.

  28. Blue Spoon*

    Does anyone else remember the one with the person who looked at a coworker’s pay stub to find their address so they could go to the coworker’s house and find out why the coworker didn’t say goodbye to them one day, then kept trying to get HR to deliver an apology to the coworker after they’d been forbidden from trying to contact them again? Iirc that LW did end up getting help and ended up in a better place, but that one was a bit of a rollercoaster.

    1. Mobius 1*

      Oh man I forgot about that one! I wonder if that LW is related to the boss of the other LW that bullied his employee into leaving a work note on a grave or whatever it was.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        No, the LW who went to a coworker’s house to find out why they didn’t say goodbye was struggling with *severe* anxiety and impulse control issues.

        The boss who bullied the LW into leaving a work note on a grave for a coworker who was off on bereavement to find was just a raging a-hole.

      2. Paint N Drip*

        THE GRAVE. Oh my goodness, that one is SO wild. That writer seemed like they totally understood their misstep but their boss is probably still a maniac somewhere

    2. Hlao-roo*

      Yes, that letter was #2 on the “my staff keeps calling me when I’m off work, my anxiety caused a work problem, and more” post from July 18, 2017. I hope their anxiety is better-managed and that they have a new (and less stressful) job!

  29. Pangolin*

    In my very early 20s I applied for a job which involved looking after a website, mainly front end work – creating content, uploading it, and doing some light editing which was totally in my comfort zone. I realised I may have been out of my depth when the interview confirmation two days before reminded me to bring screenshots of my website with me (this was not mentioned before). Rather than accept that this job was possibly expecting more tech knowledge than I could provide, I panicked and flung together a WordPress in about an hour. I arrived, did a committed if weak presentation on the four blog pages I had cobbled together, and then the questions began. it swiftly became apparent they were looking for a combination Web developer, filmmaker and editor, and communications officer. rather than acknowledge this and leave gracefully, I simply lied. Professional video editing software which wasnt mentioned in the job description? well I’ve seen someone using it and had a 90 minute tutorial on it one time so sure, I would say I am very confident and experienced with it please don’t ask follow up questions (they asked follow up questions). Have I worked with international students? Yeah loads! (in the sense that there was an Italian person in one of my undergraduate presentation groups). I distinctly remember getting confrontational with one of the interviewers who challenged one of my mostly fictional answers. I kept seeing outs and just refusing to take them. I don’t why; by this point I didnt even want the job, I was just gripped by a mad desire to ‘win’. The interview ended quickly and I didn’t get the job, but I do feel a little better that they readvertised the post with a much amended job description.

  30. SuperAnonForThis*

    There is a person at my job who got the job after suing the agency the job is with. (I found this out through a simple google like “oh I’m interested in who this new supervisor is! …huh”). Amazingly, they were still hired. Not amazingly, they have (IMO) done an incredibly terrible job. Amazingly-again, after consequences were imposed for some aspects of the terrible job being done… word on the street is that they are trying to sue again :x

    This person is still employed though, so maybe it’s not as big a hole as one would expect to have been dug… Yeah, I’m actively job hunting now.

  31. Olympic*

    Funny you should ask, my workplace is currently experiencing two groups of people digging trenches on something very dumb

    We have a television in our waiting room. It is set to the Olympics, a welcome break from talk shows. One of my colleagues talked extensively of how much they don’t like the new gymnastics style, it isn’t as graceful and rewards big moves over perfect routines.

    Another group responded that gymnastics is way more interesting and challenging with the new scoring system and style.

    Quickly, this turned into accusations of racism, sexism, and defenses to that. I usually enjoy the Olympics but this year I can’t wait for them to be over.

      1. GythaOgden*

        Yeah, my colleague always timed her lunch break for after the end of Loose Women (UK talk show featuring some rather self-righteous hosts). I don’t blame her in the slightest.

      2. SHEILA, the co-host*

        This. I was at urgent care yesterday (thankfully just allergies) and the television was broken, and it was a godsend. No Fox News, no Olympics, or anything else for the old dude in the waiting room to make racist or sexist comments about and then look around expectantly for everyone to agree with him. Everyone just minded their business on their phones.

        1. Chirpy*

          Man. I wish I could just break the breakroom tv, because even with nice innocuous Olympics, my coworker just WILL NOT STOP spouting racist anti-immigration crap out of nowhere for the entire time he’s in the breakroom.

        2. Nightengale*

          When the pandemic first hit we converted to telehealth entirely. When we started returning, we did not turn the waiting room TV daily as had been previously. I’m a pediatrician specializing in neurodivergent kids and then there is another doctor here who mostly sees adults in an unrelated specialty.

          It is WONDERFUL. The TV was set to good stuff like Bluey but then it was hard to get the kids out of the waiting room. And we just didn’t need that background sound. (a lot of my neurodivergent kids come with neurodivergent parents who are sensitive to sound.) At this point, most people who need a screen to get through waiting usually bring their own. My own medical provider has a TV showing health infobites which, again. Silence would be great please.

      3. I strive to Excel*

        We’ve got a workplace screen in the conference room that’s inexplicably hooked up to a TV feed (no clue why, we usually use it to share things in meetings) that is otherwise tuned to the cooking channel. Thank God.

        It does make everyone in meetings hungry when we have to reconnect a device and get 30 seconds of Latina Kitchen showing off some sort of amazing sauce concoction.

        1. GreenGirl*

          I am convinced HGTV exists solely to be played on TVs where the biggest consideration is, “could this offend anyone?”

          1. Generic Username*

            Well, considering the ubiquity of sliding barn doors and gray-washed wood flooring on the HGTV home remodeling shows, I might get offended.

            /I kid, I kid…

    2. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      As a figure skating fan, I’m rather refreshed to see that other sports also get sucked into the very same arguments we keep having.

      1. Beany*

        I never got over the introduction of larger heads on tennis racquets *checks notes* 48 years ago. Completely ruined the sport, ensuring faster serves and fewer extended rallies. (I’m 51 now, so I don’t know how much Wimbledon I could actually have seen with the old-style heads).

    3. SpringIsForPlanting!*

      This is why every single medical waiting room I’ve visited in the past 5 years has had their TV set to HGTV.

      1. Arrietty*

        I admired the choice by the medical clinic I spent some time at to set their waiting room TV to a nature channel. It was interesting without being likely to touch on any of the sensitive topics that might bring someone to the clinic.

        1. RC*

          Love that! I had to have surgery earlier this year and when we showed up for my extremely early appointment that I was not thrilled about to begin with they had fox news on… for a second I forgot who I was supposed to call to get into the next room and was just like NOPE, NOPE, GET ME THE REMOTE, NOT TODAY.

        2. GreenGirl*

          Which sounds nice until you are sitting there with your six year old, the lions have successfully hunted a baby elephant, and he asks if the baby will be okay.

  32. lurkyloo*

    I got a job as a Team Leader in a mailroom. Where…y’know…they open mail?
    Process goes – open mail, sort mail, input mail into logging system, deliver mail, and when the processors were done with it, file mail.
    One guy, let’s call him M, had been there since dinosaurs roamed the earth. He fancied himself the patriarch of the mail room. He enjoyed the logging of the mail. That was all. None of the rest.
    When I arrived, I noted that everyone had been trained on every job except M. So I slated him for training for all of the other roles.
    Cue the office visits. ‘I don’t enjoy opening mail nor filing. So I’m just gonna be over here logging the mail.’ Sorry, M. Everyone has to be able to do all the roles.
    ‘I tried opening mail. I didn’t like it. I’m just gonna be over here logging mail’.
    ‘I tried filing. Broke a nail and got a paper cut. I’m going to go log mail until it heals’
    So I told him that he would have to open mail for a week while some new folks were learning the ropes and that I would have K teach them how to log the mail.
    And then it came out. ‘But LurkyLoo! You don’t understand! Opening mail is beneeeeaaaathhhh me’ o.O
    Thanks M. Have you considered retirement?

      1. lurkyloo*

        lol…No he hadn’t and to my knowledge, it took several more years. I left the role after a year of that.

          1. lurkyloo*

            I don’t think so. I think he simply felt that he was able to dictate his own role due to length of time…and definitely put off ‘snob’ vibes. See the ‘broke a nail’ comment. (I’ll never forget that! He insisted on shoving the offended finger at me and that I acknowledge the broken nail. I almost asked if he wanted me to kiss his poor paper cut too…but managed to avoid that level of snip. lol)

    2. Dr. Rebecca*

      …I would *love* every aspect of that job, ngl. That’s like the ultimate in low-stress positions. Constant input/output, but very little chance of making a huge mistake. God, you’ve seriously got me re-thinking my life choices…

      1. Paint N Drip*

        One of my first jobs out of college was general operations for a pretty big business – doing the morning incoming mail, stocking coffee and printer stations, picking up stuff (print shop, office store, bakery, etc.) in the office vehicle, organizing stockrooms, ordering stationary and awards, going around collecting mail before end of day – IT WAS AWESOME. They immediately realized I’m not an idiot, put me on the phones, and ruined my life lol

        1. Alisaurus*

          Same, honestly! My first job in the field I thought I wanted my whole way through college was half that job and half office administration (basically all the things you listed). I quickly realized that was what I loved and I really didn’t like the day-in/day-out of doing my “dream” job as a career. Pivoted into admin full-time and have never looked back.

  33. A Simple Narwhal*

    I remember reading a story in an open thread awhile ago about someone who was feeling horrifically guilty about being on a business trip and on the return flight their coworker got bumped and OP went home without them, and then there was an issue with the airline refusing to give the coworker another ticket and it took them a few days to get home. They were stressed that they had already gotten in trouble and thought they were about to get fired or sued.

    People were comforting them, telling them it wasn’t their fault the coworker got bumped, they couldn’t have foreseen this issue, etc…and then it slowly got revealed in the comments that the OP actually stole the coworker’s ticket, along with their phone, knew the coworker had no money or credit cards, AND didn’t tell anyone this had happened – essentially left their junior coworker stranded in a foreign country for days with no food, money, clothing, or way of communicating with the outside world. The coworker only got home at all because he was able to get his sister to take out a payday loan to buy him a plane ticket. Oh and OP was stealing money from the company by booking tickets on an unapproved cheaper airline and pocketing the difference.

    It just got worse and worse the more that was revealed. I understand there was a lot of shame involved (the airline said they were too big for one seat so OP apparently just panicked and took their coworker’s ticket for the second seat) but OP took the wrong step at every turn, again and again. I hope they’re doing better and the coworker was made whole again – I think the company was refusing to cover his expenses because it was OP’s fault they were incurred. It was a Lot.

    I’ll post a link to it below.

    3. Back in my day*

      Oh no. No no no no no. They left a junior colleague with no money, no phone?
      That’s a whole ‘nother level of hole digging. I think they reached China

      3. AcademiaNut*

        She took the petty cash, the ticket, the company provided cell-phone, *and* had the company credit card. It was on the weekend, so contacting the office would be difficult even with a phone. Then she just…. went home and didn’t alert anyone at the employer about the problem.

        That’s after taking the fully-refundable company provided tickets, getting the refund and buying tickets on a cheaper airline to have more money to spend on the trip. Which is how she got ambushed by needing two seats on the trip back, and had locked herself out of any possibility of contacting a company travel agent with the issue.

        I think she started out saying that she felt she was being mocked by coworkers because of her weight, and was mad because the junior employee, who had been stranded and had to pay for a ticket out of pocket, and wasn’t getting refunded, had spread the story around.

    4. Meep*

      Yikes on a bikes!

      I get it is pretty embarrassing to be told you are “too fat” for one seat, but crime is not the solution.

      1. Observer*

        Yes.

        Nor is casual cruelty, and refusing to take responsibility.

        But also, the whole fiasco would probably not have happened if they had followed procedure instead of carefully cheating their employer.

        It’s amazing, and not in a good way, that at no point did they consider that they actually have an obligation to pay their coworker. But that’s the kind of thinking helps explain the kind of digging this person did.

        1. Irish Teacher.*

          I just read it and…yikes, they keep saying, “I know it is my fault” and “I’m so ashamed,” while also saying the junior colleague is going to “come after them” for the money, which implies they made no offer to pay and are hoping to avoid it, that they got sent home for saying the junior colleague would have been OK if they’d had a credit card, which sounds like putting some blame on the junior colleague and that they have been told the junior colleague is allowed to speak about what happened, which makes it sound like they wanted to prevent them from doing so.

          I mean, it does sound like they were very embarrassed about their weight and acted on impulse and like they feel people are going to judge them for their weight if they hear the story, but still it sounds like they are continuing to try and avoid the situation rather than using their shame as motivation to do everything they can to make it up to the other employee.

          1. Observer*

            I mean, it does sound like they were very embarrassed about their weight and acted on impulse

            Yes, embarrassed about their weight. But not entirely acting on impulse. The initial switch of carriers was not an act of impulse. Neither was the decision to take the phone *and* the money, leaving the the employee with no way to reach anyone and keeping the extra money they scammed from their company.

            And even worse – and what simply CANNOT be explained by “impulse” is their decision to not contact anyone at the company know.

            And their response, now that it’s out in the open is not “I’m ashamed, what can I do to make it right?” But “I’m ashamed, but it’s really his fault because he should have had a CC with a high enough spending limit, and how DARE he tell anyone about what I did, and it’s bad that the company won’t let me pester him, and it’s even worse that he actually wants me to pay for his ticket. And why should I have to pay for it, even though the only reason he is stuck with the cost is because of the things I did wrong?”

            it sounds like they are continuing to try and avoid the situation rather than using their shame as motivation to do everything they can to make it up to the other employee.

            Yes.

        2. Meep*

          Yeah. Not condoning the fraud in this, but if I was “caught” like this, I would just bill for another flight on my personal card and say nothing instead of abandonment. (And write it down as karmic energy for trying to steal.) I know panic makes us do silly things, but was she just hoping her coworker would spend the rest of his life there and never speak up, if she didn’t?

      2. Paint N Drip*

        Stories like this genuinely do me some good. They remind me that any shame I feel about being a fat person.. is mine. It sucks to feel but it’s no one else’s to deal with. Just another reason to kinda unpack any shame you deal with of any flavor so you don’t spiral and ruin your whole life :/

    7. CommanderBanana*

      I honestly could not believe how many backflips the commentariat was performing to assure the OP that it was not their fault when they initially posted. The OP absolutely should have been fired and I hope they were. Blaming it on being “embarrassed” because they’re too fat to fit into a standard airline seat was a complete red herring.

      1. Observer*

        My recollection is that most people were pretty clear on the fact that poster’s behavior was way out of line.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        I mean, the *original* story was pretty sympathetic: “I was already on the plane when they told me that I was so fat that I would use both seats my company had booked. I was so mortified that I didn’t try to turn around and get off because I couldn’t take everyone staring at me. I know it was the wrong thing to do, what should I do now?”

        The commentariat got a *lot* less understanding when it came out that the OP stole a junior coworker’s phone, left them stranded without money or resources in a country where he didn’t speak the language, was embezzling from their company, and refused to take any responsibility for paying back their coworker.

      3. A Simple Narwhal*

        I’m fairly certain people were sympathetic to the scenario OP initially presented – that bad things happened outside of their control – and once the truth came out the misplaced sympathy evaporated and writers were very clear that the behavior was unacceptable.

      4. Irish Teacher.*

        I just read it and it seems like the story was not all told in one go and I think some people missed some of the replies and didn’t realise the full story and assumed that the mistakes were on the airline or the company’s part.

        1. Chauncy Gardener*

          Exactly this. Once the whole thing came out, kicking and screaming, “we” were all pretty horrified, as I recall.

      5. Humble Schoolmarm*

        The OP absolutely should have been fired and I don’t say that a lot. That being said, in the original post, it was very much presented as “Through a series of unfortunate events, my colleague was stranded and now everyone’s blaming it on my weight” so I can see where people were quick to offer support. If you didn’t know that the OP a) was embezzling by re-booking a cheaper flight that couldn’t accommodate their needs and pocketing the difference. b) took the second ticket (the co-worker wasn’t bumped to a later flight) c) knew that the co-worker had zero resources, including a phone(!!!!), money or luggage and still didn’t tell their bosses before the flight took off, let alone when they got home and d) didn’t understand why the co-worker was upset and wanted to be reimbursed, it looks completely different.
        Actually, when I type this all out, this may be one of the worst hole diggers. At least our other members of the hall of infamy mostly just hurt themselves. (maybe not leap day boss, but I’d rather give up a day off than be stranded without resources).

        1. Meep*

          Is it bad I am curious about his luggage. Like did OP at least pick it up or did she abandon it too?

    8. MsSolo (UK)*

      This feels quite similar to the jealousy one – the writer felt shame and did whatever they could to make it go away, and when they were ashamed of their actions they tried to diminish those too. They desperately want to stop feeling bad, so everything is framed around that, every action is justified by that. It’s the same kind of impulse that drives abuse in relationships.

      (there’s also something in the drip feed of information, which starts out as denial, diminishing anything that isn’t related to the problem they want to solve, the bad feeling, but starts to bleed through because the initial reassurances don’t make the bad feeling go away, so they have to reel off more sources of shame to justify the actions that are those same sources. Shame ouroboros)

    9. Alisaurus*

      Yes!! I remember this one. I was and still am horrified and shocked by it. I really hope things worked out in favor of the jr. employee.

  34. Grey Coder*

    I have one in the same vein as Mr Perfect — the guy was fired from a very-hard-to-get-fired-from job because he just could not admit he was wrong. Call him Wakeen.

    Wakeen did a slightly dodgy thing. I’m going to have to change the situation a bit for anonymity but let’s say he submitted some work expenses that were in violation of the expense policy. Not a crime, but objectively something he shouldn’t have done or at least should have checked up on. Someone noticed and called him on it.

    At this point Wakeen could have said “oops, sorry, I misunderstood the policy/mixed up my receipts” and no one would have thought twice about it. Instead, he claimed that someone could have broken into his computer and submitted those expenses under his name. He attempted to get the IT department to wipe the logs so no one could check. I don’t think he went as far as blaming a specific person, but he did try to claim that it could have been any of a number of people that he worked with, and they couldn’t prove it was he himself who submitted those expenses.

    As is often the case, the cover-up was much worse than the crime. The fact that he was trying to get other people to alter logs, and also throwing his colleagues under the bus, meant the whole situation spiralled up the hierarchy and eventually he was fired.

    To reinforce the “I am never wrong” attitude, he asked at least one of his now-ex colleagues for a reference.

    1. Mobius 1*

      >To reinforce the “I am never wrong” attitude, he asked at least one of his now-ex colleagues for a reference.

      You know what? I kind of feel like you almost have to respect that level of self confidence.

      Almost.

    2. el l*

      Great story. And further on the “cover up worse than crime”, it’s an example of the Low Stakes Principle. Namely:

      The biggest punishments are reserved for those who go out of their way to do dodgy things for low stakes.

      (Or do dodgy things when they don’t have to. Further examples are Martha Stewart insider trading or Watergate)

  35. DramaQ*

    I was working with a professor whose last name was “Wang” which is pronounced “Wong”. Well in my dumb English centric brain it was pronounced exactly as spelled. My boss corrected me but as we continued to talk I kept saying “Wang”. I’d stop. . correct myself but then here it would come again! I had an out of body experience where I just watched in horror as my brain continued to double down on mispronouncing the name and explaining I was sorry I did it again .. and again.

    I finally asked my boss if we could just stop the conversation because yes I hear it and I want to die now.

    We never spoke of it again.

    1. Beany*

      Not really your point, but I do wonder how these orthographies get decided. Assuming that the name is originally written in a Chinese character set, why didn’t whoever chose the pinyin just write “Wong” to begin with? Is the pronunciation region-specific? Has it shifted over time?

      1. Chirpy*

        It may be due to the pronunciation of the original translating language (not necessarily English), or because the system used to write Chinese characters sounds with European letters doesn’t line up precisely. For example, the Hmong language was first written in European letters by the French and doesn’t map to the same sounds (the word for Hmong in Hmong is “Hmoob”) or the system Duolingo uses to transcribe Arabic includes “2” and “3” as letters because there are more than 26 letters in Arabic.

  36. Sabrina*

    Many years ago a coworker and I were driving to a somewhat remote construction site. We’d both been there before and he was driving. About halfway there I realized he’d just missed a turn and let him know, suggesting we turn around.

    “No. I don’t turn around.”

    “…excuse me?”

    “I don’t turn around! We’ll get there this way!”

    The big problem was the turn he missed was over a bridge, we were now on the wrong side of a river. Since we had to wait for another bridge we got there over an hour late and he peeled into the parking lot at 30 mph, which was a big deal because it was a construction site with an incredibly strict speed limit of 15 mph. The project manager who we were meeting had been in the parking lot waiting for us and saw us arrive in a cloud of dust. He was kicked off the project.

  37. GreenGirl*

    A while back my husband received a message on linkedin from someone he went to law school with “Draco.” The message was calling for everyone he was vaguely connected with to boycott the law firm he was currently working for because they were sneaky, underhanded, untrustworthy and betrayed him. Naturally we went to his profile to see what was going on and he had made several long posts. To sum up, Draco had gotten engaged to a fellow law student while they were at school. After they both graduated they got received jobs at her father’s law firm. Within the first six months he got in trouble for trying to throw his weight around (“do you know who my father-in-law is”) and got shut down. Then Draco went to his father-in-law to be who instead of protecting him “betrayed” him and after he “stood up for himself” fired him. So he sent around the linkedin message telling people to boycott the place.

    Draco made a post a few days latter claiming he went to his fiance and told her they had to make a stand. She needed to quit her job at the firm and go no contact with her father until he apologized and gave Draco a job again. She refused which showed she was just as untrustworthy as her father. Over the next two weeks Draco made several long rambling posts about how you can’t trust anyone, he wasn’t going to take it or be silenced, and basting people for not helping him review bomb his former job on Glassdoor and yahoo despite the messages he was sending people. Again all of this was on his professional linkedin profile.

    Draco’s last post was that he had flown back to his hometown and was going to live with his father since his fiance broke things off with him (also a betrayal) and the apartment was in her name. Someone, presumably his father, then deleted all the posts and closed his linkedin profile.

    1. Chauncy Gardener*

      Yikes on bikes!
      That’s doubling down times a million. Talk about laying waste to your life!

      1. Chauncy Gardener*

        Thank goodness she got this before they were married! Imagine having to divorce this entitled jerkface.

    4. LabManagerPerson*

      I feel like there’s two kinds of these hole-digging stories: One kind is where the person in question just keeps digging despite knowing better on some level and is horrified after the fact. (I’ve been this person, though not in a way that makes for a good story.) The other kind is where the person in question appears to be utterly convinced of their rightness and probably will go to their grave certain that they are right merely on the basis of the clear fact that they, by definition, cannot be wrong. This seems like a perfect example of the latter.

      1. GreenGirl*

        Or people who start out fully convinced of their righteousness then with the benefit of age/experience/maturity/therapy look back and realize, “wait, I was in the wrong”

      2. New Jack Karyn*

        You remember in “Dirty Dancing”, when Baby first meets Johnny? To explain why she’s at the staff-only party, she says, “I carried a watermelon.” While still holding said watermelon. After he turns away, she mouths the same words to herself, in instant disbelief at her own inanity.

        Anyway, I think that’s a perfect example of your first kind of hole-digging.

    5. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

      Cudos to the (presumably) father for deleting and closing the linkedin profile after realizing how stupid it is to defame a law firm and the employees who work there.

  38. Alice in Hinterland*

    Many years ago, I was a military linguist/translator. My team was conducting security screening interviews of locals who wanted to work with US forces. One of the questions we asked was “are you addicted to anything?” Only one subject ever said yes, surprising my partner (who didn’t speak Arabic) and me.
    Me: Ok, what is the name of this thing you’re addicted to?
    Subject: Mesjid.
    Me (not recognizing the word but figuring it was some sort of slang we could figure out later): How long have you been using this Mesjid?
    S: Since I was a boy.
    Me: How often do you use Mesjid?
    S: Several times a day, but especially on Fridays.
    Me (confused but pressing on): How do you take Mesjid?
    S (looking somewhat annoyed): Either alone or with my family. I especially try to involve my little brother.
    Me (shocked): With your little brother?! How old is he?
    S (looking really insulted): He’s ten. I think it’s really important to look out for him and make sure he uses Mesjid properly.
    Me (ignoring the warning bells and sirens going off in my head): Wouldn’t it be safer to just not get your little brother addicted to drugs?
    S (turning really red): Drugs?! Who said anything about drugs?
    Me: You did! You said you were a drug addict!
    S: No, I never said that! You asked if I was a believer in anything, and I told you I go to Mesjid regularly! You are extremely rude! (Starts yelling insults at me, then gets up and starts to storm out)

    Reader, at this point I realized two critical facts: (1) The word for believer is mu’min, and addicted is mudmin. And (2) Mesjid is a less common term for a mosque. The subject had misheard my original question as asking if he was religious….and things went downhill from there. I had to apologize profusely to the subject and never, ever lived that one down for the two years I stayed in that military unit. On the plus side, I did greatly expand my vocabulary of rude words that day, courtesy of our enraged subject.

    1. Having a Scrummy Week*

      Oh…my…goodness. The poor subject! What a great story that I am sure you still cringe about when you can’t sleep :)

    3. MigraineMonth*

      I thought Mesjid was going to turn out to be a video game before he said “especially on Fridays”. I just got a new video game and… well, the first step is admitting I have a Problem, right?

      1. Jordan*

        As soon as you said mesjid , I knew what this was about and started preemptively bracing for the punchline.
        As an English teacher to newcomers in my English speaking country,
        I had the opposite problem with the word. I knew mosque but when I used the term no one knew what I was referring to- and I Knew how they spent their Fridays. We finally solved it.
        Now I just start out with Masjid and tell other language learners to look for “mosque” in their own language dictionaries.

  39. Adereterial@gmail.com*

    I’ve got a direct report on a development scheme who has failed his final assessment – and thus scuppered his chances of promotion – by completely and consistently ignoring EVERYTHING I, my boss, and our director was telling him about the qualities he needed to demonstrate at that level, especially around leadership and it not just being about delivering lots of stuff but about taking people with you as you do it. He knew better, through.

    And then the feedback came through – which said exactly that. He’s STILL arguing the toss, trying to appeal the decision.

    I’ve given up.

  40. Alex*

    I worked on a team of four, where I was the techy gal on the team, whereas others, especially Fergus…just…couldn’t. Since he was also the most senior he was constantly frustrated and angry when the tech stuff didn’t go his way and left him looking like a moron.

    Anyway, one day he claimed that some information was wrong in a system. This system was cloud based. I knew how to access the source of this information and also how to access all activity that occurred–along with usernames. I told him I would look into it for him, and found that the information was actually correct. I said “Fergus, it looks to me like there are ten llamas there, just like there is supposed to be. Could you have looked at the wrong column?”

    NO. He WAS NOT looking at the wrong column, he claimed. IT WAS WRONG!

    Ok, so I went in to look at the history, and in between the time when I said “OK, all looks good” and his claiming that he was absolutely right in the first place, he had gone in and made a change to make it look like he was right all the time! However, he didn’t realize that this history button existed and that he could be found out.

    So I said hmm, it looks like you made this change a minute ago. It shows your change at 9:32am, with your username.

    He insisted he did no such thing.

    I was going to shrug it off and just correct the problem, but he then started to really double down on his being right and his NOT MAKING THE CHANGE.

    The interaction ended with him saying that my internet was different from his internet…..

    yeah OK buddy….

  41. bamcheeks*

    I still think about the guy who was rude to a woman on the tube, found out she was the wife of the CEO of the company he was intervieweing with, beleives this is why he was rejected, and then blamed his university careers team for not telling him to be polite to women on the tube in case they turned out to be his boss’s wife.

    1. Meep*

      lol. I once told off my HS photography professor for running through a stop sign after honking at him as a warning. He was on his motorcycle and had a helmet on. Asked me if I knew who he was. My response was “No. And I don’t care who you are. Don’t run through stop signs in busy intersections without looking!”

      I stand by my plucky 16 yo self on that one (my current boss was once amused I only yelled when my coworkers were doing something dangerous), but I don’t think anyone ever had to tell me not to be rude to strangers.

    2. Hlao-roo*

      Ah, “CEO’s wife ruined my job prospects” guy is a classic! (Original post from July 5, 2017 and update from July 13, 2017 for those who haven’t had the please of reading it.) I hope by now he realizes you should be nice to the janitor/receptionist/fellow Tube passengers because it is the right thing to do (and not so you can get a job offer).

    3. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      Didn’t he also complain about the career center not telling him to be polite to the receptionist, or was that someone else trying to blame anyone but himself for his rude behavior?

  42. anonymous 5*

    I’m kinda surprised not to see this one mentioned yet, but “I ghosted my ex, and now she’s about to be my boss” was dig-through-the-Earth levels (uh, depths) to begin with; and iirc the update went even further!

    2. Six Feldspar*

      I’ve been waiting for it to be mentioned and it’s much further down than I thought!

  43. Alice in Hinterland*

    I guess I have a tendency to dig my holes deep, because I have another story from my military years. As a linguist, we had a really long training school (16 months or so), and there was only one week during that period when classes were suspended and we could take leave (vacation days). As it happens, I am freakishly good at remembering regulations and field manuals, so my platoon sergeant started sending me to the Soldier of the Month boards, where you get grilled by a panel of senior noncommissioned officers about all aspects of military life, regulations, history, and soldier skills (everything from “describe the rules for placement of the drill sergeant badge on the Class A dress uniform” to “list the symptoms of severe nerve agent poisoning and the steps to treat it”).
    If you win the monthly board, you go on to quarterly boards, yearly boards, and finally (since we were on a joint service installation) the joint service Servicemember of the Year board, which is really prestigious and worth a lot of promotion points. Unfortunately, that final board fell on the Friday of my one class break, when I wanted to visit my family.
    By that point, I had a new platoon sergeant who absolutely despised the board system for whatever reason, which meant she didn’t like me, so she got her revenge by insisting the company commander cancel my leave so I “wouldn’t miss the very important board if I got delayed returning from leave”, even though I begged her to let me take leave until Thursday.
    Being 21 and stupid, I freely expressed my irritation to anyone who would listen. Being also a smart aleck, I started joking that when one of the board members would ask me why I should win the board (a standard question), I would answer that I had telekinetic powers that made me a wonderful soldier.
    Over the course of the week, I must have told my joke 25 times to various people, many of whom warned me not to say that to the board. I insisted I wasn’t stupid and would never actually say it, but I kept telling the joke over and over….
    Come Friday, the very first question came “So, SPC Alice, why should you be joint service servicemember of the year?” I had rehearsed my joke so many times, that when I opened my mouth what should pop out but “Well, Sergeant Major, there’s always my telekinetic powers!” Cue my poor platoon sergeant turning purple in the corner and the senior NCOs of five military branches on the installation in various forms of shock/outrage/trying not to laugh. For whatever reason, I didn’t miss a beat and continued with my actual prepared answer, talking about my peer tutoring and whatnot.
    As soon as the board dismissed me, I got the worst chewing out of my life by the platoon sergeant, but it was almost worth it when they called the candidates back in and told us — to my utter shock — that I had won. I thought my platoon sergeant might have an apoplexy right there from rage.

    3. Alice in Hinterland*

      I forgot to add that when I first arrived at a certain unit, years later, I actually heard a fairly accurate retelling of my experience from a soldier who went through language training a couple years after I did. She was shocked when I laughed and told her I was the idiot in question!

  44. Meep*

    I was updating security on our company machines on the weekend. I asked this guy explicitly if he had any special security measures I should know about. He told me nope and then went on his petty little way. I wasted my Saturday because this guy didn’t tell me he had encrypted the machine and refused to give me the code to it. He doubled down and insisted it was just best practices to put encryption on a company machine, which sure, but you were not authorized to do that. What got me is it turned out the code for the encryption wasn’t even that secure… It was his freaking dog’s name.

    Safe to say, he never got his computer back and was fired.

    2. I Have RBF*

      Oh FFS!

      I work in IT. We have standard, company type encryption on all of our company machines. The passcode is stored in our secure company database. If someone bypassed the corporate encryption to do their own? It would a) probably brick their machine, and b) be an IT security violation (and a crash landing.)

      1. Meep*

        Unfortunately, this is a startup and a lot of this didn’t get done until my jack-of-all trades butt put the policies in place.

  45. Darling*

    I was remined of a dear friend that was being harassed by an executive. Executive made up this world where my friend was sleeping with the Big Boss. Just to be clear, my friend is an adult woman with a close family and fits no TV stereotypes of a person that would sleep with the boss.
    It started with small comments from the Executive, “I know what you to were doing in there!” when she would see Boss and Friend in a meeting. Over months it escalated into accusations of hooking up at night and weekends. If there were events in the area, she would say the two of them were going to go and hook up at that event. It turned into a daily harassments, and the accusations increased into craziness.
    But it was all verbal with no witnesses, so there wasn’t a way to safely report it. But my Friend documented everything! Every snarky remark was kept in a notebook.
    Then, it happened. Executive emailed a remark about the boss getting a cold from Friend because they were doing the nasty. That email along with details of months of harassment was forwarded to HR which was at an offsite, main HQ location. HR called and asked for the notes to be faxed. Friend copied a hundred (!) pages of documentation and faxed it within 15 minutes.
    Executive was walked out of the building within the hour!
    I love this story because it is one of the few where HR steps in and does everything right, immediately.
    Apparently, the executive snapped out of her fantasy within a week and asked for her job back. She was getting therapy and understanding how much of a bizarre world she had created and was imposing on her co-workers.
    They did not take her back.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      I’m glad HR took action, but it sounds like they very well might have taken action far earlier if Friend had looped them in. I’m not sure she had to suffer in silence for months just because there weren’t any witnesses, given her meticulous documentation.

      1. allathian*

        Depends on the popularity and power of the particular executive. She outed herself with that email, but without it, all they would’ve had was the documentation. If the executive was persuasive, she could’ve accused your friend of making it all up and been believed…

  46. Anne Shirley Blythe*

    Years ago I worked at a copyeditor at a long-established educational publishing company that had just started hiring trained copyeditors and creating an in-house style guide. The editing department was run by a former music teacher and receptionist with no editing experience, “Eunice.” She had been “transferred” from her receptionist position and foisted on the department. She was grating, argumentative, and furious at having to work with trained editors decades younger who knew more than she.

    A few highlights:

    I was editing a test (FOR ELEMENTARY-AGE STUDENTS) that started with “question 2” instead of “question 1.” A simple typo, right? I wanted to … start at 1. Eunice wasn’t having it and was irritated by my “rigid thinking.”

    A book on Greek mythology had an illustration of a famous cisgender male Greek god. His robe was half off his shoulder, showing part of his decidedly flat male chest. The caption incorrectly used she/her pronouns. Eunice refused to change the pronouns and insisted he was a female.

    A language-arts course had a line defining facts and opinions where the definitions were transposed initially. The rest of the paragraph was accurate. Eunice’s fighting words? “YES YOU *CAN* PROVE AN OPINION IS WRONG!!” I believe that was the day I started taking quick walking breaks.

    1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

      I can understand why they didn’t want her sitting in reception. wow. Was she the one making the original errors, or just deciding that errors made by someone else were fine as they were?

      1. Anne Shirley Blythe*

        Excellent question. The latter. For years I was puzzled why she was so protective of mistakes she did not make. It didn’t hit me until recently–because she knew her job was to find mistakes! The few times Eunice’s hands-off manager would literally point to an error Eunice had missed, Eunice’s deviously avoidant response was “That should have been caught.” Yeah, Eunice, by YOU!

        1. Anne Shirley Blythe*

          Oh, to be clear, Eunice’s manager knew Eunice was the one who’d missed the errors, and so did Eunice. But both engaged in a warped polite fiction that the error-maker was unknown.

  47. DOWN WITH THE SHIP*

    Two jobs ago, I somehow missed a very important email. I said I didn’t get it, but when I went back and double checked, I HAD gotten it, I just overlooked it. But I didn’t admit that, and kept saying I didn’t get it.

    So my boss said if you didn’t get the email, maybe you should contact IT, because we don’t want a widespread issue.

    Rather than saying, oh look! I found it! – I went ahead and reported the issue to IT.

    They WORKED on figuring out the issue, and I said nothing. They had me send and receive emails to others and all seemed fine so they didn’t know the issue and it kept getting escalated.
    I said nothing.

    Finally one of the techs decided to check my inbox (I guess they gave me the benefit of the doubt, or else they could have done that first I suppose) and found the email. Also they pointed out it was clearly marked that it had been *Read*.

    I plead complete innocence and denied that I had ever seen it before.

    My boss never said anything but I’m sure she must have known I was just elaborately refusing to take responsibility.

    Ugh. I still cringe.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      Oh gods, that reminds me of my bizarre defensiveness over a process change I’d missed. The company had decided to shorten the deadline for fixing a certain type of urgent issue from 3 weeks to 1 week. At a meeting, a new manager who was peer to my manager asked for an update on my fix, and I said it would be done within 3 weeks, no problem. She reminded me that it now needed to be done within 1 week.

      So, naturally, I *argued with her* rather than admit I was wrong. No, I must not have gotten that email. Yes, I had gone to last week’s meeting (though I had been pretty zoned out); what do you mean the whole thing was about this due date change? Um, well, some of the internal due date calculators must not have been updated. (I checked. They had been.)

      After realizing how wrong I’d been, I apologized. Lol, no, I held a grudge against her for embarrassing me in front of my team. A few months later she became my manager and… uh… let’s just say things went way downhill from there until eventually I was (rightly) fired for insubordination.

      Sometimes getting fired and having to start fresh somewhere else is a *gift*.

  48. I don't work in this van*

    We had a team member on customer support for a b2b software platform who didn’t actually want to be promoted, he just wanted one of his coworkers to not be his boss. So he started asking about how he could be a team lead and we gave him several concrete steps (he was very good technically, but could get very condescending both with customers and coworkers, so some stuff around that and more tactical stuff as well). Instead of, I dunno, doing any of those, he just started acting like he was the team lead, including ending each day by trying to assign work to the rest of the team. So he’d go to leave (the team worked staggered shifts to cover more time zones) and say something to everyone like “Okay, James, make sure you get to these 3 tickets before you take off.” We asked him to stop as it was inappropriate, so he… started trying to lead team meetings? I don’t even know what was going through his head. We had some other issues with him (he asked someone about their spouse’s skin color/shade about 6 minutes after meeting them for the first time). He eventually showed himself out, but we had to keep reminding him he wasn’t the team lead on a regular basis.

  49. ferrina*

    I had a new hire that didn’t make it to his 3rd week. The role was entry-level office job- we’d show you the practices of the industry, but candidates had to come in with a familiarity with the MS Office Suite. This requirement is stated in the job posting and in the interviews, but it’s an basic requirement in my industry. This is important.

    My new hire, let’s call him Fergus, is struggling by the end of his first week. He can’t complete the basic training tasks. Finally I assign him the most basic task I can think of- update data in a few PPT slides with pre-made charts. This should have taken 5 minutes. After an hour I go check on him. I am stunned- he is typing in updates into data labels, not editing the actual data, and he’s confused why the chart isn’t updating. He’s been doing this for an hour and never sought assistance.

    I regain my composure before he notices and calmly ask him how much experience he has with PPT. He admits that he’s never used it before. I ask why it was listed on his resume if he’d never used it (yes, it had been listed on his resume), and he says “I knew I could figure it out” (spoiler alert: he could not). I explain to him that this is a basic requirement for the job. I tell him that I can do an intensive remedial course for him and that he is required to be in the office on Friday for the training (it’s a hybrid role; everyone is local, but wfh is offered at manager discretion).

    He decides not to come into the office on Friday because he’s “too stressed out” and wants to work from home. When I call him, I get a full rant about how my expectations are “too high” and he is a “professional who knows what to do” and who am I to be “policing his work and giving him orders and assignments.” Y’all, I’m his manager and my job is to give assignments.

    I immediately relay this conversation to my director, who goes to HR to talk about the best way to terminate this guy. No need- within an hour he sends a long email to the director and HR complaining about how self-righteous and bossy I am, and how he simply can’t work under these conditions. He complains that I provided inadequate training because I expected him to know common Powerpoint functions without showing him. He proposes that he no longer have a manager and that I put together a 6-month training program to teach him how to use PPT.

    My director fired him on the spot.

    1. But maybe not*

      THE CHUTZPAH

      I know this story is real because I’ve met (thankfully not managed) other people just like this.

    2. LabManagerPerson*

      He proposed not to have a manager, huh? So, he would like his reporting chain to be straight to the CEO, or direct to some deity?

      1. ferrina*

        I think his grand plan was to be managed on his own recognizance because he was just that brilliant.
        You know, at less than a month in.
        When he had been failing his basic onboarding.
        Because he lied on his resume.

    3. I Have RBF*

      Wow.

      I taught myself to use the MS Office suite, and Word Star, Word Perfect, Lotus 123 and other software before that. I put it on my resume that I know them, because I have actually used them. When I was temping I took tests on them, and . But I have never claimed knowledge of something I never used.

      Yet there is a part of me that wonders how hard can it be to look up or use the help menu to figure out how to update and repopulate data fields for a chart.

  50. Betty*

    It seems deeply unkind to include the first letter in this context. She was obviously really struggling. The update even had a blue box note about being kind to the letter writer.

    1. Having a Scrummy Week*

      I agree. That whole story was sad and honestly, under enough stress, could have happened to any of us.

      1. Observer*

        If you are talking about the person who didn’t get the job because she bullied someone, no.

        There was a chain of bad choices and bad behavior and resolute refusal to accept any responsibility.

        Sure, not a monster. But her behavior was not something that “anyone might have done under stress”.

        And this is story is a classic example of “stop digging” + “figure out what you need to change”. That LW was never going to move forward without that.

      2. ferrina*

        Disagree. The first letter could have happened to anyone- goodness knows, I was not a nice teenager, but I’ve grown into a pretty decent adult.
        And the job faraway and the cheating boyfriend feel like really bad luck.

        But screaming at Rockstar while drunk? That’s some Real Housewives level drama. Most of us either 1) don’t get that drunk in a public place and 2) our brain just wouldn’t go there. And if – IF – we somehow met both conditions 1 and 2, afterwards we would feel mortified, ashamed, and recognize the blame as being entirely our own. The LW insisted the Rockstar was somehow to blame.

    2. Peanut Hamper*

      I think you are misunderstanding the purpose of this post. It’s not to make fun of people, it’s to commiserate. All of the linked stories were prime examples of the kinds of things we don’t want to do, shouldn’t do, but have probably at some point done. It’s a good reminder that we are all human and we need to be kind to ourselves and to others.

      This is not a mortification post.

  51. AnnoyedInWonderland*

    One of my primary responsibilities here at Teapots Inc. is to assist clients with assembling their own teapots according to our specifications. A typical email I’ll get is “Hi, I believe I have constructed this teapot correctly, but when I go to pour my tea, it flows sideways instead of downward.” And I’ll respond “Ah yes, your gravity module is slightly misaligned” with specific instructions for adjusting.

    We hired a new teapot support agent a couple of months ago and it became very clear very quickly that she had cheated considerably on her interview questions (our hiring is done remotely, and part of our process is a technical test).

    – During her first week, our boss gave her a demo of some of our most commonly supported teapots, including issues commonly faced by our users (spout and handle swapped, lid installed upside down, dormouse infestation, etc) and how to resolve them. At the end, he asked her to give a sentence or two describing some takeaways from the presentation — the expected answer being somewhere in the neighborhood of “clients often encounter lid issues and I should be prepared to handle that” or even “I’m sorry, I don’t drink tea so I’m not terribly familiar, could you show me the dormouse thing again?” Instead, she replied with all confidence, “We sell tea, and our tea is better than our competitors’ tea.” Yeah. I dunno either.

    – Another day, I was asked to forward her an older support request from a client that was already resolved, and see how she handled it. This email contained a description of the issue along with a detailed illustration of the faulty teapot to help us recreate the problem on one of our in-house demo units. I asked her how she might approach supporting this client, and explained that I wasn’t looking for an immediate solution (she was new to teapots after all), but rather an idea of her troubleshooting process. Ask us where to find documentation for this particular model, attempt to recreate the issue herself on the test teapot she was provided, that sort of thing. But no — she sent an email to me that resembled one of those instant form letters you get when you try to contact some mega-corp for support. Basically:

    “Hello and thank you for contacting Teapots Inc. Based on your letter, we see that you require assistance with your teapot. We recommend taking the following actions:
    1) Troubleshoot your teapot.
    2) Take actions to remediate any problems found.
    We hope this information has been helpful.”

    Zero indication that she understood the assignment or did anything but give ChatGPT a couple of half-assed prompts. We kept begging her to ask questions, give us feedback, say anything to indicate she could process what we needed her to do, but all we got were more and more generic robo-responses.

    She was let go after two weeks, which is about a month longer than she should have lasted.

    Honestly, the March Hare would have been easier to deal with.

    2. Happily Retired*

      “… issues commonly faced by our users (spout and handle swapped, lid installed upside down, dormouse infestation, etc)”

      Dormouse infestation! I am dying here.

    3. ferrina*

      Sounds like the new hire that I posted about that lasted a whole 2 1/2 weeks!

      Also- love the imagery of the gravity module in teapots. This is amazing!

  52. Megan Thee Scallion*

    I used to work for a nonprofit where cutting corners is very typical. We used a terrible proprietary software that our CEO’s kid made in coding class in high school. Our tech guy, Mark, was basically responsible for keeping it functioning by running out new patches and recoding it whenever it crashed, the guy’s life was hell but he did the best he could.

    We got a new staff member “John” and he really hated the software and assumed most of the issues were Mark’s fault. Mark was in an office on the other side of campus so he never met Mark in person.
    We had a vendor coming in to look at our tech. John mistook Mark for the vendor and gave him a full tour of the software, calling it dog crap and that he spends most of his day “wanting to punch Mark in the face” and that Mark was a “F*cking idiot”. Mark just smiled the whole time, despite most of us trying to interrupt John.

    Just then, the vendor comes in and goes “Hey, Mark!” I’ve never seen someone wilt the way John did.

    2. Blue Spoon*

      I’m imagining the vendor saying that like “Oh hi Mark” from the movie The Room.

  53. Peep*

    My coworker who is normally a cinnamon roll/golden retriever, often has these “dig dig dig” moments… he told another coworker very earnestly that they had the personality of a black hole. And meant it as a compliment.

      1. Peep*

        Right?? Putting mouth in motion before putting brain in gear, I guess! I’m trying to remember any of Digger’s other gems.

      1. Peep*

        I think that’s what they were going for, yes, more like… magnetic, charismatic? (The other coworker in question is a bubbly, charming person who worked magic with our donors and volunteers, so I get Digger was trying to compliment coworker, but…. womp.)

      2. New Jack Karyn*

        That’s how I read it! Everyone falls into her orbit, that kind of thing.

        Peep is right, big Golden Lab energy on Digger Man.

  54. Belinda*

    My husband used to manage a guy named William. They’re childhood friends, and William was even the best man at our wedding. (Sidenote: never manage your friends!) It was performance review time, and William did not respond to the review well, despite being rated highly. There was literally one sentence in the review that William disagreed with, and it wasn’t anything factual but more of an opinion statement about William’s attitude. My husband acknowledged that William didn’t agree with it but refused to change it. William then escalated the situation to my husband’s boss (who had already approved the review), then when Grandboss also refused to change it, William escalated it to HR (who had also already approved the review). My husband and I were shocked that William would put himself on HR’s radar this way. He also complained to all of his friends (many of whom were also my husband’s friends) that my husband gave him a “bad review.” In the end, William ended up being terminated for insubordination. It happened on a day when my husband was out sick, which saved him from the task of having to terminate his friend. William and my husband are okay now, but it was a blow to their relationship that took a long time to recover from. It bears repeating: don’t manage your friends.

    1. GreenGirl*

      I’m glad the company fired him instead of keeping him around because “well he is friend/family member of other person and we don’t want any problems with them.”

  55. Jam on Toast*

    Attended a multi-team meeting a couple of years ago. It was part of a company reorganization that saw a number of smaller teams being brought under one reporting umbrella. The meeting started off with your typical icebreaker: Stand up, introduce yourself and your role and then tell us one interesting fact about yourself. Very standard fare. I’ve visited all the provinces and territories in Canada, or I binge-watched all four seasons of This TV Show in 3 days because I’m a huge fan, etc.
    Until we get to one fellow, let’s call him Bill, who proceeds to tell us all that his interesting fact is he used to boost (steal) cars as a teenager in high school. Everyone does a double take, including all of the team managers and company leadership, but Bill seems oblivious to the fact that the wows he’s eliciting aren’t impressed wows but horrified wows and carries on blithely, bragging about how many cars he stole, how fast he drove them, and even the technical process for jump-starting them.
    It finally comes to a head when he turns to a female team member and says nostalgically, “Yeah, Ted and I had lots of fun. He was even better at boosting cars than I was!” Turns out that Bill and Ted had gone to high school together back in the day, and his now-wife had no idea what he’d gotten up to because Ted had kept his disreputable teenage interests very much on the down low. So Bill had not only told everyone on the team about *his* previous criminal activities, but he also managed to out his old pal’s activities to Ted’s wife, who was not only horrified by what she’d just learned about her spouse but also beyond mortified at having this very embarrassing fact revealed in front of all her coworkers and managers, too.
    As for Bill’s fate? It will probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone who reads AAM to learn that Bill did not pass his six-month probationary review and was let go.

    1. I Have RBF*

      Holy crap, that mother is wearing an entire banana ensemble, complete with hat, to church on Sunday.

      With a mother like that, I’d move to New York and take up with a man from another religion and race just to not get sucked back into the controlling insanity.

  57. CanadianJessie*

    I worked on a small team, and it was a requirement to keep certain paperwork on file – and we’d occasionally get audited, so it was a fairly big deal.
    I had a coworker that *hated* filing. He tried pawning it off on me, but I wouldn’t let him. He was just letting it pile up.
    One day, the boss was looking for a file, and it wasn’t where it’s supposed to be. He asked us if we had it, we both said no. It was a pretty important file, so I pulled my boss aside, and suggested he look in coworkers drawer, since I knew it was full of stuff he had never filed.
    Boss goes to coworker, asks to look in his drawer. First he says no, there’s nothing in there. Then he says he lost the key. Finally, he opens the drawer.. Boss freaks out, says he expects that entire drawer to be filed properly by the end of the week. (And yes, the file he needed was there).
    So. Next day – his drawer is completely empty. I doubted he filed it all that quickly. So I checked on a few of the files he worked on, and they weren’t in the files. I think he threw the whole load into the dumpster. Boss didn’t believe it, told me not to worry about it. Ok. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
    Time goes on, we’re still having issues with files not where they’re supposed to be. An audit is coming up, I’m getting worried. I go to the boss, and tell him I think he’s hoarding the files again to avoid filing them. So – instead of confronting him, since that worked so well last time, we waited until he left the room, and left his keys on his desk. We used his keys to unlock his cabinets, but left them closed. Then waited until he’d left for the day, and emptied all his cabinets. Not only his 2 drawer cabinet, but all of his overhead cabinet was packed full of un-filed, completely disorganized, files. So – we moved them to an empty office, and everyone *except* him spent the next few days filing. He never said a word about the empty cabinets.
    They were working on firing him, but then I quit – and on a team of 3, they couldn’t let him go without really screwing things up. So he stayed for years, from what I heard.

    1. Arrietty*

      Firing him would screw things up more than his utter refusal to comply with audit requirements? That’s cutting off your nose to spite your face logic!

  58. Lab Boss*

    My team once found some signs that a product my company made, could struggle to work well on very fatty foods. At a meeting to discuss this, the product’s lead designer (who was constantly bragging about what a perfect product he’d designed) kept denying it could be a problem with the product. Page after page of data supporting our claim and he just kept making up less and less plausible explanations: we mis-labeled our samples, we didn’t do the testing correctly, we were trying to make him look bad. Finally he claimed “well, I can PROVE it works with high-fat foods because we tested it with 50% fat ground beef!”

    If you pay any attention to food regulations, in most states (including ours) that’s well above the fat percentage you can sell in ground beef. We called him out on it and he said that he had got a special deal from a small local butcher (note: still not legal) and that HE knew how to talk people into doing what he wanted, and he wouldn’t tell us where he bought it because it was a secret. That’s right, he made up an imaginary butcher who sold him imaginary beef.

    We eventually came up with a solution for the issue, which was obviously caused by fatty foods. He’s no longer with the company but for a long time we’d joke about “Oh, I can get that from my butcher. You wouldn’t have met him, he goes to a different school, but he really exists.”

  59. ILoveLLamas*

    Many years ago I was at a company-wide meeting where off-site teams were brought together. Part of the agenda was about the bonus structure. My site, one of several, had been spun off into a different corporate entity and we went from being the biggest bottom line contributors to 3rd party contractors who now brought in minimal $$. I was riled up as I learned that we were not being compensated like other off-site people with the same job who worked for the parent company. The discussion was a bit lively with the off-site leadership tactfully pointing out the imbalance. I stayed quiet until we walked over to lunch and was walking next to a guy who I didn’t really recognize. “Did you get a bonus?” I asked. “Um, yes.” And I doubled down. “Do you think it is fair that there are people doing the same work and not getting the same compensation?” He murmured something about seeing my point. It was a 3-4 minute walk and I.kept.going. Then someone kindly took me aside and told me I was walking and ranting with the CEO. Nobody would sit with me at lunch – LOL. In the CEO’s defense, he did make it right with us. But I was cringing the rest of the meeting…..

  60. H.Regalis*

    This is a TTRPG one and not a work one:

    I was in a group and the DM’s homebrew campaign was not going well. He was showing up hours late to session, would often cancel after we were supposed to start playing, couldn’t remember what level we were, couldn’t remember what happened last session, and would start every session with, “What do you guys want to do?” basically expecting us to create the story for him because he couldn’t be bothered to do the prep work you have to do as a DM.

    One night instead of playing we had yet another discussion about where the game was going because none of us were happy with how things were. I started out saying, “I know you’ve been really busy lately with work and applying for grad school so why don’t we do board games for a few months until—” and the DM cut me off. He didn’t want to play board games. Someone else suggested that he run a module to cut down on the amount of prep work. Nope, he didn’t want to run a module. How about someone else DMs for a while? No, the DM wants to DM and not play. How about we take a break for a few months so the DM has time to get caught up on prep work? He said no to that as well because he said he’d just procrastinate and not do it. Then he came out with, “What I need is for you guys to be okay with the game being awful until I can get my shit together.”

    The campaign fell apart shortly after that night.

  61. Mari*

    I got a job because of someone failed to stop digging, if that counts?

    I used to substitute teach at a private High School – long story why, but suffice it to say I’ve been a teacher for two decades, and between moving countries, a young child, work visas, the state deciding to make transferring my license as hard as was humanly possible … being a sub was a good fit for a while.

    Anyways, a few years ago, one of the teachers in the department I subbed for retired, and they hired a new teacher – straight out of college. Set up the mentoring program right away, paired him with a senior teacher, pretty much the best supports you could ask for for a new teacher.

    He decided to ignore ALL of it. Walked in two weeks before the year started, declared that the books that he was supposed to be teaching were ‘inappropriate’, changed them – and sent the parents a revised materials list without clearing it with anyone…just bull-headed his way through. Not good. Department head sat him down, explained there way a process, tried to get him back on track… he said all the right things (new, eager, trying to make a good impression) and kept doing what he was doing.

    Then the parents realized some of the content of the books – VERY not appropriate for grade level – like, graphic abuse scenes and sexual violence against minors in a G9 class inappropriate. Parents, not totally unreasonably, raised hell, school had to swap the books, and pay for the new ones AND refund the parents for the inappropriate ones. Teacher threw a hissy fit.

    Three weeks in, I got a call from the department head – could you come in on a two week contract to mentor this teacher? Be in every class, offer support, help with some classroom management skills? Ok, a little different, but sure – not my first mentoring role in my career, and maybe someone outside the department will help a little.

    I walk in my first morning to be greeted with “You think some stupid sub can teach me how to teach? She’s a babysitter, not a teacher”. I decide I’m going to ignore this, and just shadow. His first class is a G11 group I’d subbed with for a medical leave – I’d been with them for six weeks in G9. They know me, they don’t blink at me being in the room.

    20 minutes in, a student asks a question and he responds with “I’ve covered that already, are you deaf or just stupid?” I ask him to step out of the room with me – you don’t talk to students like this, period. He storms out of the room, and starts screaming at me in the hallway. Principal is summoned, asks him to calm down, he says he will when I’m out of his classroom. I explain the situation, Principal says “Let’s take this to my office”. Teacher freaks even further – by this point, every door on the hallways is open and students are literally watching the meltdown.

    He finally says “You need me – who else is going to teach this class of idiots?” Principal turns to me and says “I assume you can cover?” I say yes and she holds the classroom door for me…

    The next morning, Principal is waiting for me when I walk into the school – Teacher quit, saved them from having to fire him – how long can I stay? I agree to sub through the end of term, so they can repost the job.

    I start back for my fourth year full time in two weeks :)

    2. allathian*

      Congrats!

      I think it’s awful that teachers like that jerk can somehow pass the licensing requirements.

  62. makerbrarian*

    I work in a library Makerspace. I get a lot of people assuming I don’t know anything tech-related because I present as female, but usually that just takes a quick correction.

    One day while we were out and about for a training, though, a friendly patron recognized my male Makerspace coworker. I was wearing a jokey t-shirt with a ghost that says “Boooooks,” so I admit it was perfectly fair of this guy to ask me what kind of books I like to read.

    Mildly embarrassed by my own false advertising, I stumbled over my answer and said I haven’t read much lately.

    Patron: You’re a librarian who doesn’t read much? That’s so funny haha.

    Male Coworker (who was always fighting the good fight, bless him): I don’t read much, either.

    Patron: But that’s okay because you work in the Makerspace! You do cool tech stuff!

    Coworker, clearly dying a little: So does she!

    And then we were all embarrassed.

  63. Nonymouse*

    Grinning like an idiot AGAIN over the bully letter. I will never get tired of rereading it. It is a delish dish of consequences aren’t coincidence.

    Signed~ a four eyed, buck toothed, pale as a ghost, chubby, ginger book-worm nerd child.

  64. hohohope*

    I’ve got kind of a double-digger story, because there are two people determined to get their way at any cost: we announced a managers meeting to roll out a new program that is being implemented. Nothing super difficult, but our owner, Brenda, wanted to have all the managers together to discuss it. One manager in particular, Steve, hated everything about the idea. He didn’t want to go to a meeting, he didn’t want to learn a new system, and he would just continue managing his area the same way he had been, thank you very much. I empathized but said it was mandatory. He said he refused, and nothing would change his mind. I went to Brenda with his concerns and she said if he did not go to the meeting and start using this method, she would consider that to be his notice that he no longer wanted to be a manager and his title and pay would reflect that choice. He begrudgingly agreed to go.

    The meeting was being held offsite at a very high-end restaurant with meeting space. We had been very clear about the dress code, but Steve showed up to the meeting in ratty jeans and a hoodie, with the hood up. He looked so bad that a staff member of the restaurant literally thought he was a prowler. I suggested we just send him home then, but at that point I think it became a matter of principal for Brenda, who said he was going to stay and complete the training no matter what. He did stay for the day, but was completely obnoxious. Some of his tactics:
    –He refused to watch videos – making a point to deliberately look away from the A/V equipment if a video was playing. When Brenda called him out on it, he faced the TV but covered his eyes.
    –Everyone was emailed a handout that they were supposed to complete over the course of the meeting with their division goals and other things. They were supposed to complete it and email it to Brenda, who shared it with the group via the A/V setup. She opens Steve’s handout without looking at it first, and there on the enormous screen was his form, where he filled in every single open field with “This is stupid and a waste of my valuable time.”
    –In a brainstorming session, he would make outlandish suggestions like “Go to space and sell to aliens” or “discover a previously unknown species of underground earth dwellers and use them as cheap labor”, and when our boss called him on it he would very sanctimoniously say “remember, there are no bad ideas in brainstorming, Brenda.” This was hilarious, but not helpful.
    –He would derail discussion by belaboring every single point. Almost anything anyone said, he would pick it to pieces. I was trying to keep things moving by saying “we’ll come back to that later, Steve” or “we’re not getting quite that granular right now, Steve” or “if you have questions, write them down and we’ll come back to them” or something similar but it was happening so much that I was exhausted and resentful. Everyone was irritable and nothing was getting accomplished and everything was taking forever. The entire meeting just turned into a strange battle of wills between Brenda and Steve. And yes, it was ridiculous, and yes, multiple people tried to speak up about it and nothing changed, and no, it was not reasonable, but that is just how some dysfunctional workplaces are, and all you can do it just deal with it. Or leave – which was what Steve chose to do. He quit the next day, and enough time has passed that the story is kind of funny now. And every now and then someone will very deliberately use “go to space and sell to aliens” or some other little bon mot from that meeting. That is Steve’s legacy.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      I don’t fault Brenda one tiny bit.

      The only things she might have done differently was send Steve home when he showed up dressed like that (and demoted him for missing the meeting), or fired him on the spot when he covered his eyes to avoid watching a video.

    2. The Prettiest Curse*

      Wow, Steve is a total dick and should have been fired- but “there are no bad ideas in brainstorming, Brenda” is kind of hilarious!

    1. GreenGirl*

      “Alison, has anyone else mentioned today the absence of blue bars (stripes)? – the indicators of unread posts. Can’t say for sure if they were there yesterday, but they’re definitely gone today. ”

      I can see them.

  66. HRneedsAdrink*

    Had a newish (about 4-5months) employee (Sansa) come to me (HR) stating some ‘concerns’ regarding her office mate (employed about 2 years). These 2 employees were a team, had the same qualifications and did the same exact job (it was divided fairly and evenly). Sansa was concerned about her coworker’s laziness, Sansa felt as though she bore most of the work, had most, if not all, of the difficult cases/ clients, her coworker was rude to clients and just didn’t seem to care about the company. Sansa had examples and seemed genuinely concerned. I started investigating, but the coworker resigned immediately after the investigation began.

    Temporarily transferred another employee to help Sansa, but she stated that employee was also lazy, rude, mean, etc. Transferred other employee back to her original dept.
    Hired a replacement. Apparently, she too was lazy, rude, difficult, etc. Hmmmmm….. I told Sansa that we needed to give the new hire some time. Sansa didn’t like that answer and stated that she could do the job all by herself, if we would just give her a bump in pay. Hmmmm…..

    New hire starts making small mistakes, mistakes that no one who’s every worked in this field even for a day should be making (and this lady had a few years’ experience). When asked how things were going, the new hire praised Sansa stating how kind she was and all the ‘extra’ training she had provided her. After investigating, turns out that Sansa was training her incorrectly (on purpose? don’t know, she wouldn’t admit it when confronted).

    We transferred the new hire to another department and told Sansa that she was now on her own to handle all of the clients. With no bump in pay. She now cried that she wasn’t going to be able to handle it on her own. Then she quit 2 weeks later. When her manager cleaned out Sansa’s desk, she found loads of incomplete work dating back to when Sansa started. Instead of just doing her work, apparently she would complain about her coworkers to make herself look better?

  67. DEEngineer*

    I worked in manufacturing and we had a guy remove a machine guard to clean a belt. Which is ok. But then he turned the machine on so he could clean the belt as it turned and save time. His glove got caught in the machine and he ended up with a minor injury (first aid). He was fired because it is against all safety rules to operate the machine without the guard. He challenged this (with union representation). His argument was that he was trying to save time and increase efficiency for the company and he was such a diligent and dedicated worker. I mean, he was, but it’s worse that it was a deliberate, considered decision to forego a safety rule rather than a mistake, and he had no concept that this was a bad argument. We all felt bad for the guy, because he had been at the company so long and it was his life.

  68. Sparkly Unicorn*

    One of the other stories on here just reminded me of this gem. I had an overseas colleague we’ll call Steve who was generally just awful to work with. He was constantly accusing people of trying to undermine him because he was terrible at his job. The office had a company video camera that was kept in a locked drawer of his desk. It was meant to take video of new products or trade shows or whatever to send around internally. Anyway, during one meeting, the managing director says “Steve, go get the camera so we can set it up in here to do [work thing].” Steve goes and gets the camera and someone MD jokes “there better not be home videos of your kids on here” right as they’re setting it up. Well wouldn’t you know it, but they turn the camera on and it immediately starts playing back a video of Steve’s kid playing soccer. Instead of just saying “oh, yeah, I guess I did use this for my kids game recently, my bad” Steve starts yelling at everyone in the room and accusing MD of breaking into his desk, taking the camera, filming Steve’s kid at a soccer game, putting the camera back and locking the drawer all to be able to make him look silly for a moment. When MD said it was fine and he had just been joking about the home videos and it wasn’t a big deal at all, Steve doubled down and just kept ranting and accusing everyone of being in on it.

    Steve was not let go due to this incident, but was eventually forced out of the company. Sometimes I wonder what he’s doing now and if he’s ever had a moment of self reflection. Probably not.

  69. Indie*

    About 10 years ago I was leading a project with a very tight deadline. We needed some very specialized skill set, it didn’t makes sense to get someone internal trained and we hired a contractor, let’s call him Mike. Mike came very highly recommended, interviewed perfectly, and his first week seemed to go fantastic. Come the second week of his 3 month mandate and he didn’t show up. No phone call, no email, complete radio silence. I was trying to reach him to see if everything was OK and if his deliverables were in good shape for the end of the “sprint”. He picked up his phone on day 3, cussed me out and started rambling up about payment. My company had a very strict schedule for paying contractors, I was never in charge of any aspect of it, wasn’t even supposed to see his timesheets. I tried to diffuse the situation but the phrase “unprofessional behaviour” slipped out my mouth. At which he replied that it was my opinion and my problem. At this exact moment our project manager walks into the conf room just in time to hear this and says into the speaker “Nope, pretty sure it’s yours now”. Mike’s access was gone 15 min after.

  70. MysticAlpaca*

    During covid, my company cut our pay and hours to 75% across the board. My area of work wasn’t impacted by covid, and it was during our busy season, so I ended up working up to 65 hours while only getting paid for 30 to meet client deadlines. I was pissed, and decided my act of resistance was to refuse to sign the letter acknowledging my pay was cut.

    The deadline passed, I ignored a few reminder emails and then HR began reaching out. Unfortunately, the way they reached out was to just slack message me “Hi Mystic” and not provide any context. This is still my biggest work pet peeve, so I dug in even more and decided I wouldn’t answer until they sent me a message saying what they wanted. They never did and just messaged me “Hi Mystic” every day for at least a month, and I ignored every single one.

    Finally, after 6 weeks, I got an “action required” email from HR, cc’ing my boss and our regional manager from HR, saying that I needed to sign ASAP or else. By that point, said boss and regional manager had gotten me moved back to full pay, so I didn’t even have anything to be mad about anymore. Fortunately, they were both entertained by my antics, and also told me to cut the crap and sign it, which I did finally.

  71. Mark This Confidential And Leave It Laying Around*

    I am currently watching a recently demoted coworker joyfully keep digging. I have tried to help but every suggestion falls on deaf ears. Every single thing we have to do together? Push back. And it’s not just me. I’ve watched this person frustrate literally everyone they interact with. They’re not a bad person, but they are reflexively oppositional. I have given up on trying to train, guide, or even gently suggest any course of action lest it result in Opposite Day. My money is on a PIP sometime in the next 6 months. We are painfully understaffed or they’d be on one now.

    1. allathian*

      They should be on one now regardless of how understaffed you are because they aren’t doing their job properly and wasting everyone else’s time as well.

  72. Not a plant*

    One time I went to visit my girlfriend at her all-women’s college. I arrived early on a Friday so she got permission for me to attend her psychology class. The professor ran one of those games where everyone chooses to hold up, say, a red card or a blue card. If you held up a red card, everyone (you included) would get 2 points. If you held up a blue card, you would get 1 point but everyone else would get zero. I helpfully explained (this was long ago, before the term mansplaining had been invented) that the best choice would be for everyone to hold up their red cards. Everyone did, for a while, until someone broke ranks and help up a blue card. I mansplained, I assume more aggressively, that she was lowering her own score. More students started holding up their blue cards. I said “why are you all so bad at math?!” More and more students held up their blue cards, even my girlfriend, until I was the only one stubbornly holding up my red card. After the professor ended the game, some of the students said they were holding up their blue cards not to have more points than others, but specifically to minimize the number of points I received. One person even asked if I was a plant.

    1. The Unionizer Bunny*

      Your story reminds me of how Maz Bazerman (a professor at Harvard Business School) auctioned off a $20 bill to every class on their first day. He had only 2 rules: bids were in $1 increments, and the second-highest bidder had to pay despite receiving nothing. Bids were known to exceed $200 with, one might suppose, each bidder thinking “I may only recoup $20 of my bid but at least I won’t be losing all my money like that bastard who keeps driving up my expenses by bidding against me!”

    2. Jiminy Cricket*

      I am disproportionately delighted by this story. Good for those women. Good for you for the clear-eyed way you tell it.

  73. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    Not work, but my personal life. I have a master’s degree in a fairly niche historical topic (Think something like Elizabethan Tea Pots). This historical niche tends to be dominated by misogynistic mouth breathers. My nonmisogynistic, non-mouth breather friends respect me as a recognized Subject Matter Expert in Elizabethan Tea Pots, and I respect the ones who are Subject Matter Experts as well. We were at an event for Elizabethan Tea Pots, and a macho he man woman hater mouth breather decided to try to mansplain me regarding the exact topic of my Master’s Thesis. My also subject matter friends all grabbed popcorn, because they knew I was about to destroy this joker. He made several incorrect statements, which I corrected. He doubled down, misquoting from an autobiography I had used in my research. I corrected him again. He started getting mad, so I asked him if we should call Doctor X, the writer of this autobiography and a good friend of mine to see what she had to say. He spluttered and walked away. I heard through the grapevine later on that he was badmouthing me in the Elizabethan Tea Pot Community, as “that B!tch who didn’t know her place in the community.” I just laugh when I hear that.

  74. Tinker Tailor Solder Dye*

    Not work related, but a…Personage my partner and I are dealing with currently is just grabbing a Ditch Witch and PLOWING as deep as she can go with regards to her utter failure to be a stable parent. Discussed how she should be able to commit Medicaid fraud in front of us to social services, refusal to get a job despite clear language in treatment plan, and just obliterating her relationships with her kids by babying them to the point that they do not want to participate in calls. It’s…honestly amazing to watch; we could do nothing, and by default, we’re getting custody because she has so spectacularly bombed every chance she has had.

    1. New Jack Karyn*

      Oof. That’s gotta be so hard to watch. I’m glad you and your partner are there for her kids.

      1. Tinker Tailor Solder Dye*

        It’s almost funny how utterly narcissistic and stubborn she is to accept even the slightest bit of criticism: “I AM RIGHT, YOU ARE WRONG”. I’m frustrated, but it’ll be over with soon, and we can mend things on our end, hopefully without her abuse and interference.

  75. Alisaurus*

    This reminds me of the letter writer who had taken a drink from a coworker because it was on a table in the break room and all of his other jobs had common areas where stuff was up for grabs so he just assumed and took it. And then he wouldn’t accept he was wrong, wrote in for validation, then argued with Alison… I think of him often.

    I’m off to dig up that link.

  76. Nannerdoodle*

    I had a coworker who single handedly messed up several processes enough times that we had to add a double check by another person to the processes to make sure that any mistakes were caught the same day. So instead of 1 person taking 2 hours to do something, it was now 2 people taking 2 hours each. This coworker had the audacity to complain about how long the processes took with the added double check to all the people who now had to do way more work because of her.

    And because she really could not see the hole she’d dug, she’d come into work every morning and drink hot chocolate for an hour at her desk while everyone else was doing laboratory work. Then she would complain that no one told her to join them in the lab to do the work when everyone has the same job. There was a small celebration when she was let go.

  77. Coffee please*

    I put someone on a PIP after a year of documentation. He hardly ever did any work that actually needed to get done, rather he’d invent tasks that interested him more. A few weeks into the PIP I marveled at him actually sitting down and typing (working!!) at his computer. It turns out he was typing up a letter to myself and HR exemplifying why he was on a PIP essentially.

  78. Cedrus Libani*

    One of my first jobs, as an 18 year old college student, was working the selection camp for a nerd sport with a yearly international tournament. Basically, two dozen national finalists compete in a multi-day event, with the winners being chosen to represent their country at a similar event abroad. Someone’s got to judge all those performances, so former camp-level competitors (mostly college students) would be hired to work the event.

    Fast-forward to the end of camp. We’ve agreed on the team. The results aren’t public yet. As I staggered back to my room, I saw one of the competitors. “Look, I know you can’t tell me the winners. I just want to know: did I come in last?” He was a favorite going in, but he completely blanked on an easy one, and that was enough. He didn’t make the team, but it was close; he definitely wasn’t last. Also keep in mind, exhausted and pissed off, and my brain to mouth filter is questionable on a good day. I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. “You weren’t last. Go to sleep.”

    I woke up the next morning to a line of competitors outside my door. “Was I last?” “I can’t tell you.” “But you told Wakeen!” “That little snitch…fine, you weren’t last either.” “Was I last?” “No.” I called an emergency huddle. “Y’all, I stepped in it. I told Wakeen he wasn’t last, he told everyone, now they all want to know. New plan. We tell EVERYONE they weren’t last. They’ll figure it out eventually, then we laugh at them for believing us, and then they’re back to not knowing anything I shouldn’t have told them.”

    Could have worked, but we missed one. They compared notes, and then the organizer found the one weeping in the bathroom. She’d come in last! Wasn’t anyone else, so it must be her! (No, she wasn’t. Yes, I lied to somebody else’s face.) Organizer was furious, and justifiably so.

  79. Feeling Feline*

    How Delta Airline handled forcing a person of colour off an overbooked flight was impressively bad. So bad it became a meme.

  80. Summer Day*

    Back in the day we had a department that was going to be quiet while their boss took a 6 month Sabbatical, so Sam was assigned to my team against his will. Sam was not performing well… in fact… we were strongly suspicious he was underperforming on purpose. As I was leading the project for our team it unfortunately fell to me to talk to him about things like “you need to turn up to meetings at both the correct time AND the correct place”, “you need to charge your computer before a meeting”, “it’s not a good idea to start a meeting by insulting the people you are about to ask for help”. You get the idea! Anyway, it wasn’t working out, Sam made it clear he had no interest in attempting to learn the skills required in our team so my boss removed from the project. For reasons known only to Sam he decided as an exit strategy it was necessary to share his opinions on what he saw as the key deficits in team members personalities. From memory- I was bossy, condescending and he didn’t like the way I managed people. This created all the chaos you can imagine, however, in the absence of Sam’s boss Sam now had 3 months with virtually no assigned work. He floated around the office intermittently with a smirk on his face, until his boss returned. She found out about his behaviour and was livid. For the rest of his tenure every project assigned to Sam was designed to build on the “transferable skills” he had gained from working with our team. Sam’s performance was now dependent on assistance from the very team members he had wildly insulted. Unbelievably he lasted a further, largely unproductive 6 months!!

  81. WorkingRachel*

    Many years ago, I was in charge of promotional products for a convention, and we were ordering something that had a tight turnaround, so I was in close contact with a vendor for the actual production. I went out to lunch for some sort of celebration organized by my boss. I had my cell phone on me, but I didn’t really use it for work, so didn’t think to be aware of it.

    We came back to the office about 2 hours later to find the receptionist crying. Apparently, the vendor had called several times while we were out and was furious he couldn’t get in touch with me. The receptionist–we’ll call her Ann–had tried my cell, since she had the number, and my boss’s cell, but neither of us answered. The vendor had yelled at her for not being able to find me when there was such an important order on the line. I was all kinds of mad: he yelled at someone in a support role for something that wasn’t even their fault, and I knew it had to have been pretty bad for Ann to be in tears, since she was both very helpful and not particularly sensitive.

    I called the vendor and told him it was unacceptable for him to yell at Ann. Yes, we had a deadline, but at the end of the day it was just water bottles or whatever. He…did not take this feedback well. He made all the excuses, and when I didn’t back down on the whole “don’t verbally abuse my colleagues” thing, he started yelling at me, letting loose years of pent-up gripes about my company. I had been ready to pull our business already, but he just kept doubling down, to the extent that I said out loud, “You’re really diggimg a hole here.” That still didn’t stop the rant. The last thing I remember him saying was, “You know what? I don’t like Jennifer Warblesworth,” a same-level colleague of mine who also bought branded products and was, to be fair, incredibly frustrating to work with. Joke was on him, I guess, since I pulled the conference business immediately and he continued working with Jennifer on our commemorative products for some years after that.

    I was in my 20s and usually crumbled in the face of conflict, but his reaction was so outsized I remember being surprisingly calm throughout, like I was watching some sort of anthropological example of a person having a one-sided meltdown.

  82. Not The One*

    In a previous job we had a staff member who was an all around bad fit for the position. She was one of those special people who combined being bad at the job, defensive, hyper critical of others, and extremely passive aggressive. She always claimed to be “learning” and always had an excuse for why something wasn’t done or was done incorrectly. Whenever she felt criticized she’d cry and lash out and tell others that they “were not perfect either”. People who were known for having the patience of multiple saints would become visibly frustrated with her. She was a whole broken staircase that made us all climb up and down an outside fire escape!

    We worked at a large, public university where it was notoriously hard to get rid of people, especially if they’d been there a long time, so our boss’s solution was to give her increasingly easy and seemingly straight forward tasks. One of her jobs involved reviewing an automated data evaluation tool to look for errors and inconsistencies in data files, and then send those to another analyst to investigate. The testing tool literally highlighted questionable results in a bold, bright red font and her job was to note those and email someone else.

    Well one month we processed a whole batch of files and belatedly discovered a key field wasn’t populated (essentially a key identifier that was used to match records across multiple sources). As the most senior person on the project (our boss was very conflict averse…whole other story) I was drafted to go ask her why she hadn’t flagged the missing field, since the testing tool clearly showed it as a problem in the big, red, bold font – think DANGER WILL ROBINSON THIS FIELD IS ALL NULL DO NOT LOAD FILE STOP NOW. You could not miss it!

    So I sat down with her, said the file had been run through and now subsequent deliverables were wrong, and opened the testing tool to show her. She looked at it and at first claimed not to see the problem. Then after a few minutes of us both looking at the big red warning, claimed it “looks different on my screen”. So we went to her computer and opened it there and, you guessed it, same exact thing. Then she said “well it didn’t look like that before”. We checked the time stamp of the testing log and saw it hadn’t changed since she moved the file forward. Meaning what was being displayed was the same result as what she saw. At which point she says “well it must just be different on my machine” and puts in a ticket to the help desk about her “Excel being broken” (the tool was based in Excel). She put me down as a reference in the ticket as someone who could “verify” that it was “broken”.

    I guess she went back and forth with the help desk a bunch of times and, shocker, they could not find anything wrong with her version of Excel because it was the same, enterprise level version we all had! The help desk person finally contacted me to ask wtf was happening and I told them to stop wasting their time and close the ticket. She never admitted that she’d missed anything, although that did serve as evidence for our boss to finally move forward with a PIP. During the time she was still there (way too long) I’d hear her telling anyone who would listen about her “Excel being broken” and the help desk being “useless” at fixing it.

  83. Not Bender*

    This is low-stakes, but early in my career I was just starting to use social media, as so many of us were at the time, and so mostly what I would do is post quotes I thought were funny. I loved Futurama (because it is awesome), and found one song by Bender — a badly behaved robot — so hilarious that I had to share it. It goes “I love stealin,’ I love takin’ things.” I had somehow managed to have my Twitter posts shared to my LinkedIn, because this would be very useful in some way, and so someone kindly pointed out to me that I was sharing a love of theft (which in restrospect I’m not even sure I had credited as coming from the show) on a job-related site. I was still convinced this was incredibly amusing, so I just…left it there, on purpose, until I got around to tweeting something else. I wasn’t job searching at the time and my boss was as un-savvy as I was with social media, so as far as I know I never suffered any negative effects from this declared fondness for larceny, but I would probably not advise others to follow in my footsteps on this one.

    1. Not Bender*

      And lest I forget the “keep digging” part!–I also posted a reply specifically on LinkedIn, the professional network where I was displaying my professional credentials, saying something like “Bender is my hero!” Which would clarify the source of the quote to anyone who watched the show, but provide absolutely no information to anyone else, other than that I really did love stealin’ and takin’ things.

  84. SpringRain*

    For years, I worked in a landmark building in a major American city with very strict security protocols. We all had a badge with our photo and name on it that was verified by security every time we entered the building.

    One Halloween, one of my colleagues came to work dressed up as a unicorn. He walked into the building with a full on unicorn mask that completely covered not just his face, but his entire head. Security stopped him in the lobby and told him he needed to take the mask off before he went any further. My colleague refused to remove the mask, and instead showed security his badge with his name and photo. Security said, “That’s not enough. You need to remove the mask so that we can be sure that you are the same person in the photo.” My colleague continued to refuse.

    This went on… for a while. Eventually building security called our office to explain the situation and asked for our help in resolving it. But it was no use. My colleague refused to remove his mask and refused to leave the building. At one point, he suggested taking a new security photo with the mask on so that his physical presence would match his security badge.

    He never made it up to the office, not just on that day, but any day thereafter. He was fired for being a dick to the building security staff and showing terrible judgement for a simple request. He had always been a little weird, but I never expected him to die on the hill of wearing a unicorn mask into the building.

  85. iglwif*

    This is tragically recent: I was interviewing internally for a new job — like, new to me obviously, but also newly created — in a field that I had volunteered extensively in, but never actually worked in for pay.

    I was asked to tell the interviewer about a time when I had done X thing. (I’m trying not to be too specific…) And the first thing that came out of my mouth was “Well, when I’m trying to explain X to someone, I pretend I’m talking to my mother, because that helps me assume positive intent…”

    And then I kept explaining, and went off on a whole semi-related tangent about something I had recently had to explain to my mom.

    A week or so later my actual job got re-org’d out of existence, and with every job I’ve applied for since then, my daughter has reminded me, “If you get an interview this time, remember not to talk about pretending people at work are your mom!”

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