let’s talk about times when someone righted someone else’s wrong

by Alison Green on October 3, 2024

Today’s “ask the readers” is for my mom: let’s talk about times when someone righted someone’s else wrong (a favorite pastime of my mother). Maybe a colleague stood up to the office bully on behalf of a more junior colleague, or a new manager flagged a pay gap and got it fixed, or any other time a brave person said, “This isn’t right, and I’m going to fix it.”

Please share your stories in the comment section.

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{ 156 comments }

{ 156 comments… read them below or add one }

  1. Caz*

    How about one from my own mother.
    My mum was a Special Educational Needs Coordinator in a mainstream school (commonly abbreviated to SENCO, in the UK at least.) She was really bloody good at her job and ended up being made head of her department. Immediately on appointment, she informed her headmaster that she was renaming the department, and she wasn’t asking. They weren’t going to be “special needs” any more because every kid knows what “special” means and it becomes a slur. They were going to be “learning support”, because everyone needs support now and again. They still focused 90% of their time and energy on kids who would traditionally be labelled SEN kids, but they also had the time and space for the kids who were struggling with the history homework this week and just needed a bit of occasional extra one-on-one time. When she retired, the school library was named after her.

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    2. Minimal Pear*

      I love this! I’m disabled and really dislike the term “special needs”. It feels so euphemistic, like being disabled is some disgusting thing that has to be hidden behind vague language. And I think having the assistance open to everyone could help with stigmatization and is just generally a great idea.

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      1. Caz*

        She is sadly deceased but many people admired and appreciated her – parents and kids alike – and that appreciation spurred her to do more all the time. Thank you ❤️

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    5. Excel Gardener*

      Reminds me of a story my parents told me about when my brother was in elementary school. He had had delayed reading and speech due to a minor physical development issue (weakness in the mouth or something, I don’t really remember, he grew out of it eventually). Anyway, by the time he was in 2nd grade he was a bit behind but still in the normal range for reading and speech, but for some reason his teacher disliked him and had zero patience for him, so she kept sending him to the special education teacher.

      Eventually the special education teacher, who understood what was happening, decided to take my brother under her wing for reading and writing lessons that year, and provide him just as much focused attention as the other special ed kids, even though my brother was at a much higher level than the other special ed kids. She even had him assist her with the other students at times, which helped raise his self-esteem.

      By the end of that year, my brother was at normal levels of reading and writing and did fine in school, eventually becoming an engineer. He just needed some individual attention and a teacher who believed in him.

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    7. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

      Love this so much. I’m only on the first post and my eyes are teary. My coworkers are going to think I have a problem today.

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    8. Strive to Excel*

      It’s interesting how most of our modern slurs for people with disabilities started out as the actual medical term for it. People keep coming up with more and more delicate euphemisms and it keeps not working because no one wants to be classed as being “lesser”.

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      1. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

        It keeps not working because people without disabilities continue to categorize people with disabilities as lesser.

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        1. Georgina Sands*

          Exactly, this. It’s not disabled people who ae trying to change the language, it’s the ableist non-disabled people who keep trying to call me “differently abled” or some such, yuck

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      2. Beth*

        Many of our modern slurs started out as the ‘polite’, ‘mild’, or even self-chosen terms for a specific group. I’m thinking of all the words for LGBTQ+ people that have gone through this–queer and gay have both been reclaimed but have been/are used as insults too, many others that we used to choose for ourselves now have a bad enough history that I don’t want to list them. I think some racial slurs have gone through similar evolutions, too.

        It turns out when you have a word that’s used to label a specific group, and a lot of people view that group as lesser beings, that word will end up being used as a slur. There’s no word that’s delicate enough to hide prejudice.

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      3. ReallyBadPerson*

        I was surprised to find that in the high school where my son teaches, the faculty do use some of the older medical terms to make it clear to one another what the needs of the student are. For example, one of my son’s students was clearly struggling, and my son, a first year teacher, was at a loss how to help her. When a more experienced colleague explained that the student was “MR,” it really helped him recognize that there would be different measures of progress for this student. Maybe a 60 out of 100 on an exam would be success for this girl. I know we are often horrified at the older terms because they have been used as slurs, but they do have meaning, and can be used in a neutral way to communicate.

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    9. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      I just read this and thought of Dennis Dunstable: “Please,Sir, I’m ESN.”
      Sir: “And, err, umm, Dennis, you, ahh, know what that means?”
      Dennis: “Yes, Sir. I’m Educationally Sub Normal.”
      -Please, Sir. Series 1, 1968.
      Thanks to people like your moms who fight to stop this horrific labeling. Now if she could only do something about the cafeteria food. /jk

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  2. Nonny today*

    I worked at a chain bookstore in high school, mainly as a cashier, and for my first holiday season, I had to occasionally gift wrap things. This is a free service we provide, which we’re not trained for. So I was pretty new to it, I’d done it before but for family (aka small stakes).

    One of my very first gift wrapping experience was for an impatient lady who was SO rude to me. She might’ve had awkward shapes, not just flat books, but when I was done she commented something to the effect of, “if I’d known it’d be like that I would’ve just done it myself,” and stormed off. It nearly brought me to tears, so much for thinking I’d done an okay job.

    The customer behind her was the sweetest person who reassured me it was fine, I was doing a good job and left me maybe $5? (We don’t get tips! Or we’re not supposed to anyway, but she wouldn’t take it back.) The man after her kind of reiterated the same thing and left me a few dollar bills too. Any time I remember that rude lady, I finish by remembering the nicer people behind her. The kind of person I aspire to be, even though I freeze too often and get awkward in tense social situations.

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    1. WeirdChemist*

      Mine’s also from a retail job!

      I had a job where I had to answer customer calls a lot. If we ever got a call with a customer that was excessively rude or inappropriate, he would ALWAYS transfer the call to himself so that we wouldn’t have to deal with them. This started after I took a call that literally made me cry – I got called a “useless waste of oxygen” and “a shame on humanity that shouldn’t bother existing” (because we sent this woman a catalog… no, really). He took that call, reamed out the woman for treating his employees that way, and made a policy that we could always transfer any customer calls to him and he would handle them.

      In a sea of nightmare retail bosses, he was the best :)

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      2. Dittany*

        Not that it matters, but why did she object so strongly to being sent a catalogue? Was it the subject matter, or did she just passionately loathe junk mail?

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        1. Old Woman in Purple*

          Some people just aren’t happy unless they have something to complain about &/or someone to make miserable. My grandmother was like that.

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      3. Lab Rat*

        When i was working retail, I had a customer come in asking for an “expletive *slur against gay people* for his expletive *slur* son”.

        I was so shocked I said “excuse me?”

        *AND HE REPEATED HIMSELF*

        I said I couldn’t help him, and it made him mad. I spoke to our manager who was this tiny, balding british man about 5 feet tall and HE approached the customer who REPEATED THE SAME THING.

        Manager kicked him out of the store after telling him HOW INAPPROPRIATE THAT WAS in the most british way possible.

        He also stood up against all manner of irrational customers for us and never, ever placated someone just because they were shouting.

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  3. Panda*

    An employee left and I took on her duties in addition to my own because I had her job before her and was the only one who knew what to do. My manager fought with HR to pay me extra for the months I was performing the other person’s job.

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  4. juliebulie*

    I had to go out of town for the day. My lunch was a Happy Meal from McDonald’s. It was about $3 (it was a long time ago). My boss (a close relative of Guacamole Bob) refused to approve the expense. I asked someone from Accounting about that, and she rolled her eyes and said that was crazy and she’d pay it.

    In retrospect, I should have expensed my mileage as well, but I was young and didn’t know.

    Not the sexiest story, but I was shocked at how stingy my boss was.

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  5. ThatGirl*

    Two years ago there was an opening on my team, and I had a former coworker who was looking for a new job and who I knew would be great to work with again. So I told her about the opening and let my manager know I highly recommended her.

    After she got the offer, my manager called me to let me know that she had accepted, and also that Coworker had asked for a bit more money than I was making at the time. And my manager didn’t think that was right, so she got HR to raise my pay to be a bit more than Coworker was going to be making. It was not a huge amount, and I might not have ever found out about a discrepancy, but I really appreciated Manager doing that.

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

      I had that happen to me- a new employee negotiated for higher pay than I was making and I would technically be her supervisor, so my manager gave me a raise. The kicker? I had gotten a raise earlier in the month, so I had two pretty good raises in under 4 weeks.

      At my former employer, they brought back an employee who had predated me to do my job AND paid her a significant amount more. The women who covering my old job got a big raise and a bonus to match the new employee’s pay. Turns out, I had been significantly underpaid for what I was doing (which is one reason why I’m very happy where I am).

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      1. ThatGirl*

        Yeah, that was my second raise of the year AND I got another decent one on the merit cycle. It definitely earned my manager some loyalty from me.

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  6. Caz*

    Oh, another one! My old boss knew my worth (arguably better than I did) and determined that I was underpaid. Because I work in the NHS, getting a new pay rate was …an undertaking. He took the time over 18 months to completely rewrite my job description from the ground up (12 months) and then get it through banding (another 6, plus some tears). When we got the “right” outcome – on the second try – he also made absolutely sure that the uplift would be backdated by 6 months. Best boss I’ve ever had, 10/10 would work for him again (and actually tried to but he didn’t have any vacancies!)

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  7. Andrea*

    My legal name is my married name, but I’ve used my maiden name at work forever, and it’s mostly not been a big deal. But at my last job, someone suddenly decided that everyone had to use their legal name for their email, on their business cards, everything. It was wildly confusing — a lot of “who is William? I’ve known that guy as Chuck for 20 years” — and of course it’s a minefield for trans folks.

    I complained to HR that not only was it confusing, it was affecting certain genders and gender identities more than others, which put the company at risk. The response from our very conservative HR manager (a woman about my age) was “maybe if you used your husband’s name like a normal woman, you wouldn’t have an issue.”

    I went straight to the VP of my area (my boss’s boss) and repeated both my complaint and what the HR manager had said. He got in contact with the VP of HR and instructed that everyone who asked for their contact info to match their preferred name should be accommodated. The HR manager HATED me after that, but I never had to explain my name to anyone again.

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    4. Former professor*

      At my old university, our systems would recognize exactly one name. So the name on your paycheck had to be the name on your insurance had to be the name in the course catalogue had to be the name on your email. I was a decade plus into an academic career with dozens of publications and was absolutely not changing my professional name, but obviously needed to be able to show ID at the doctor to match my insurance… thankfully a similar situated friend had found the workaround of having a legal name with a space rather than a hyphen (“Alice Smith Jones” instead of “Alice Smith-Jones”) and just not telling HR about the name change (to remain “Dr. Smith”). Which is RIDICULOUS in the 21st century as the only way to handle this!

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    6. Lab Rat*

      I had to quote the MFing Human Rights act of Ontario to get HR to not deadname me. (I had JUST moved and could not legally change my name for 12 months).

      They backed down. My professional college backed down (but I had to send a SCATHING email to them because they were NOT going to let me do it. Then the president of the professional college emailed me as damage control. It was delicious.).

      But apparently they put my legal name in parentheses on one of the union lists, thereby outing me anyway, but thankfully all but one coworker was a jerk about it and I blacked out the name when the new lists were posted.

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  8. TheExchequer*

    My boss (whom we’ll call V) skipped talking to her direct boss and called up her boss’s boss (whom we’ll call M) on my behalf to advocate for me, to tell M that the extra workload they were giving me on top of the already overwhelming work I did was, perhaps, a bit much. (Actually, the story I got later, hopefully dramatized, was that V was so mad, she cussed out M, and M was so upset, she hung up on V!). It didn’t actually affect my workload in the slightest (I was still very much in the fog of “if I keep doing an unreasonable amount of excellent work, it will eventually be rewarded!”), but I really appreciated how far V would stick her neck out for me.

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  9. EMW*

    A former coworker recruited me to his current company. When he asked me about salary I told him $X. He said: “What I heard you ask for was $X+30k. Hold firm on $X+20k because the recruiter will try and talk you down and you won’t be happy in this role for a lower salary. He was extremely right and I’m very thankful for his guidance.

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    1. Paint N Drip*

      Anyone who corrects a low-ball is such a superhero to me – whether you don’t have the information to know better, whether you don’t have the faith in your skills, or anything else, bless the folks that guide us toward equitable pay.

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  10. Insert Pun Here*

    This one is small but I’m proud of it anyways. Many years ago I had a coworker who I really, really, REALLY disliked. This coworker had an unusual (for white Americans, which most of my workplace was) name, which was pronounced in a way that was not immediately obvious or intuitive to native speakers of American English. Our director (3-4 levels above this coworker and kind of intimidating) consistently said her name with the logical-but-wrong pronunciation, and at one point I took advantage of a private conversation with him to correct him — and the correction stuck.

    We’re both still in the same industry (though not the same employer) and I still dislike her, but at least people are saying her name correctly.

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    4. Ally McBeal*

      I have gone by a nickname (diminutive of my legal first name) since I was 13; the only person allowed to use my legal name was my late grandma, after whom I was named. In my early 30s I took a job and HR automatically coded my email signature with my legal first name because that’s how it appeared on my tax paperwork – we were at a university that had been embracing preferred names for STUDENTS for several years, so that was frustrating to begin with. Fortunately I got that corrected within 2-3 business days, but one coworker in my department had really attached herself to my legal name, despite being introduced to her personally with my nickname. She did it several times over email until my manager stepped in without my even saying anything to my manager about it. I was grateful to/impressed by my boss and my coworker adjusted really easily after that.

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  11. Andrea*

    I thought of another one. My first job in my field of expertise was at a TERRIBLE company — low pay, not a lot of time off, micromanaged down to the minute, etc. I’m still friends with most of the people I worked with there because you bond with people in situations like that.

    One day a guy I sat near, but he wasn’t on my team, was incredibly sick. He was exhausted, couldn’t breathe, had such a sore throat that he couldn’t talk. His immediate boss wasn’t around, so he went to his grandboss, who was the big boss of the whole place, to see if he could go home. The grandboss said, and I quote, “no, just try not to breathe on anyone.”

    My own boss was out that morning, but when he came back, he heard about it and went to the sick guy and told him to go home, and told him “next time you’re sick and your own boss isn’t around, you come to me.”

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  12. TRex*

    These are more a series of tiny corrections but the impact is massive for me. At work my pronouns are they/them (outside I use some neopronouns in addition to they/them, but that’s life on hard mode for lots of folks and not worth getting into in the office). Occasionally I hear coworkers correct each other if they mess up, even when they don’t know I’m in earshot, or there will be a gentle correction in the chat of a video meeting and it’s just.. it’s huge honestly. I had to get HR involved in my last job because someone refused to use my correct pronouns, but here everyone pitches in to remind each other and it’s the best.

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  13. CWW*

    I was a first year social work intern in child welfare without any previous white collar experience and was extremely eager to do whatever was asked of me and show how good and dedicated and smart I could be. Unfortunately, this meant experienced and stressed and overwhelmed workers were cornering me when I was alone and asking me to do things that would take work off their plates but would not teach me anything or train me in any way. Much of it was clerical and harmless but not the point of the internship.

    The cherry on top of all of this was when I was asked to do a home visit to the home of a known and convicted murderer with an open cw case by myself. It’s easy, they said! Just see if there’s food in the fridge! Just see if there are any exposed electrical wires! Watch out for aggressive dogs! And so on.

    One of the other supervisors figured out what was happening. The other workers were sat down and told they were no longer to ask me to do anything by myself and if they were so excited to train me, they were free to take me with them and teach me but I was no longer going to be the first visitor to an unknown home. I was instructed to tell this supervisor and my supervisor if anyone cornered me, who they were, and what they wanted.

    It did not happen again. And it taught me (a) what my internship was really for and it was not to get even better at people pleasing; and (b) how to advocate for younger, newer, inexperienced workers.

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  14. BigBird*

    Not office-related, but my daughter in middle school. She had a friend with mild special needs who ate at her lunch table every day. Apparently he had once walked into the girls’ room by mistake in elementary school and as a result one of the girls at their lunch table objected to his presence–5 years later. Given a “it’s him or me” ultimatum, my daughter chose him, and they were both exiled to eat alone. This went on for several weeks but as more “outcasts” joined the table it developed a weird fun energy that encouraged even more people to join and it became THE table. I did not know any of this was going on until I got an email from the original student’s mom with the subject line “Your Daughter is My Hero.”

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    2. In the middle*

      Kids can really be the best. We had a Ukranian refugee join our middle school mid year (he had Seen Things) and one of my most annoying lunch tables of goofy 7th grade boys swooped in as the new student walked in the cafeteria, invited him to join them, took him through the lunch line. Basically folded him right in like they’d known him forever. I emailed the parents that night to let them know that their goobers were growing into really nice people.

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      1. Lizzo*

        Oh, this is making me cry. We have so many refugees in my own city who have Seen Things (So. Many. Things.) and seeing them make social connection and have some sense of normalcy is the most wonderful thing. Especially the kids.

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      2. Lab Rat*

        When I moved to a different country as a preteen, it was the goofy annoying boys who took me in as their own.

        At the time I had no idea what gender dysphoria was, but I was allowed to be what i thought was a very boyish girl around them. Turns out I am a girlish boy.

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    3. ndqueer*

      as a neurodivergent queer, who knew neither of these things in middle school (I just knew things were hard and social interactions were confusing) but I was absolutely part of a parallel outcast crew, my heart is FULL. I love this so much. 10/10

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  15. Aggretsuko*

    One of my bosses shut down my coworker who was bullying me. He’d been bullied himself and he managed to make her stop. He couldn’t fix the rest of the situation of the entire group hating and shunning me (which is fair), but he made it stop. And while he couldn’t stop management above him from punishing me, he made it clear that he didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. I miss that guy.

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  16. ProudMama*

    Not work-related, but I always loved this story about my daughter. In high school, her Spanish teacher had a mistake on her Scantron answer sheet that resulted in my daughter not getting an A. She was only going to fix my daughter’s test, but my daughter pitched a fit and insisted that the teacher re-grade over a 100 exams so everyone else could potentially have the better score. She came home that day saying, “the school might call you today….”

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    2. Katie*

      Honestly it wasn’t all that ethical not to regrade. If I had been that teacher and didn’t have the energy to regrade, then everyone would have just gotten that question right and added points too everyone.

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    3. Bonkers*

      She had to fight for a Scantron re-grade? Jeezipeet, what a lazy teacher. Couldn’t even be bothered to feed some papers through a machine to get it right? FFS.

      Reply ↓
  17. Willow of the Conglomeration*

    When I was in my old position as an admin for a maintenance department at a large plant, my boss was on vacation – meaning I had to answer to Plant Manager. My interactions with PM were generally very limited since I worked in a different part of the building.

    On this day, PM came to me and said I needed to order a repair for a flat tire on a piece of heavy equipment. I asked which tire it was. He snapped at me “You don’t need to know that” and walked away. I responded with, “Yes, I do, it’s the first question they ask – ” and that’s when he literally slammed a door in my face.

    About five minutes later the heavy equipment mechanic came to me and said that PM told him that I was refusing to call for service. I explained that no, I just needed to know which tire and PM was refusing to tell me. He sighed and said it was the front driver’s side, I thanked him, and called the company.

    I later learned that he went to PM and RIPPED into him for the way he spoke to me, telling him that he needed to learn how to talk to people.

    I appreciated that far more than I could put into words. I know that the issue was that PM didn’t know and wasn’t about to admit that he didn’t know, but either way there was no reason for him to speak to me the way he did.

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    1. Cinn*

      “I know that the issue was that PM didn’t know and wasn’t about to admit that he didn’t know, but either way there was no reason for him to speak to me the way he did.”

      See, I don’t get why people can’t just acknowledge that they need more info? Like doesn’t the PM here know that he’d get what he wants done faster with a “I’ll just check with Bob, back in a mo” or a “Dave knows, can you please check with him?” admission than screaming at someone? (Which is a douche move and shouldn’t be done anyway, but it’s not even like it would get the job done.)

      But I love the fact that the mechanic went and gave him a taste of his own medicine.

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      1. Willow of the Conglomeration*

        PM was one of those people who could NOT admit he didn’t know something. See, he knew everything about everything. And if he didn’t know it, then it wasn’t something worth knowing.

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      2. MsM*

        Defensiveness, especially if you feel like you should know. When I have twinges of that, I try to remind myself the other person isn’t asking questions as an attack, take a deep breath, and start figuring out the best way to get the information.

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  18. Tiny Office No More*

    For several years I had been stuck first into a cubicle then in a tiny, windowless office barely bigger than a coat closet. There was no airflow, so if I closed the door to keep out the noxious fumes from the x-ray developer thingy, I’d suffocate. At that time, my job was heavy on paper files, which overflowed the filing cabinet and could be found stacked on top of it, around it, and underneath a chair. I had been begging for a larger space, or the very least a space to house my overflowing files, to no avail. While I was on vacation, leadership did a walk-through of our larger area, and my colleague (who is just an awesome person to work with!) was very quick to show them my office, tell them why I had to keep all this paper, and why I needed additional accommodation. I came back to work with the news that I was being moved into a larger office nearby, with space for 3 lateral filing cabinets, that I wouldn’t be sharing with anyone else, and what color paint and carpet did I want? Sadly not all the walls went straight up to the ceiling, but I had a door, and since I could easily hear everything going on outside my office (and I mean EVERYTHING), I could pretend I wasn’t around when my idiot boss knocked on my door. Probably the best thing about my office was that it was bigger than hers, and she hated that.

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  19. Jane Bingley*

    When I first joined a company as a team member in an entry level position, I quickly discovered there was a “missing stair” senior level exec. (For those not familiar – a missing stair is someone who’s clearly a problem but rather than deal with them professionally, new team members are either warned to avoid them or learn the hard way). He was rude, made sexually explicit comments, joked about domestic violence, and chalked it up to his culture – he wasn’t from the country where our company was founded, but neither were about a third of our team members, and he was the only one who regularly broke basic HR boundaries. Everyone knew he was a problem but no one wanted to take action.

    After a couple of years at the company, I was promoted from team member to team lead. Shortly after, one of my team members complained to me that he’d made a sexually suggestive comment to her. She was just venting, but I realized I had both real power and real responsibility now. So I met with her and we walked through her options (ignoring him, her addressing him, me addressing him as her boss, or formal HR complaint). She chose to file a formal complaint, which I supported her in doing, and he faced real consequences for the first time ever. Shortly after, he left our organization, realizing that he wouldn’t be able to get away with his nonsense any longer.

    I was SO proud of my employee, who not only righted her wrong but played huge role in getting a crappy person out of our company and made all of our lives easier. And on my part, it felt good to realize that as a supervisor I could make a real difference in the office experience of my employees.

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    1. Sandi*

      Similar story:
      We have a coworker who has been a bit touchy for years. I vented to my boss last year and she asked to tell his boss. I didn’t want him to be punished because no one had ever told him no, but now he knows and has stopped and we are all happy. I am so thankful for my boss!

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  20. EMW*

    Thought of another one. Cw antisemitic graffiti

    Due to lack of parking I started parking in a different lot and walking a new path into the building. I noticed some poorly cleaned graffiti on a brick wall. I stepped back and realized it was a swastika – the paint wasn’t there but the brick was faded in a blurry shape of it. I was alarmed this was on the side of the building facing the street. Raised the issue with HR and they explained someone has spray painted it years ago and that was the best they could clean it since it was brick. I said that’s probably not a good solution and asked for them to see what else could be done to remove all traces of it. Nothing happened for months. Every day it enraged me as I walked past it. I spoke with the plant manager. Same story. I asked why they thought this was a good solution for such an inclusive company that promotes their values so highly.

    Finally on the way out of the building after a particularly horrible day at work, I decided enough was enough. I called the ethics hotline. I planned to report it anonymously but it was very clear everyone would know it was me. Two days later the wall was painted red. I’ve never been so satisfied with the immediate results of a complaint as I was for this one. Both the HR manager and PM pulled me aside to make sure I saw it. I said “Of course! I walk by it every single day.”

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    1. Strive to Excel*

      Woooooow.

      Kudos to the ethics hotline, and shame on the HR and PM! They could probably have commissioned a local graffiti artist to do them a quick doodle. Or hung a banner over it. Or escalated it themselves.

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      1. Ally McBeal*

        I would’ve straight-up brought a can of spray paint to work and taken care of it myself. During the 2017-2020 presidential administration, I took a Sharpie with me on my daily mental health walks to scratch out all the “Hillary for prison” graffiti and other QAnon bs that was proliferating at my local park. I cannot imagine walking past a swastika every single day.

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  21. ExplainiamusMucho*

    In the clown rental business (I do clown communications) we often hire assistant clowns for shows. Our two biggest clowns decided to blacklist an assistant clown because she didn’t want to sleep with the head clown (yes, really; they were that classy). They went to the secretary with some farflung reason; as far as I remember it was something like “her clown technique isn’t up to par”. The secretary – who basically ran the whole place by that time – simply said “No”. Then she hired the assistant clown for the next three shows. The two big clowns huffed and puffed – but honestly, what did they expect? Only a fool goes against the secretary.

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    1. Human Embodiment of the 100 Emoji*

      I know the clowns are just a way to anonymize, but I can’t help but imagine a serious meeting with the secretary happening with everyone dressed in a full clown costume.

      Reply ↓
    2. Zephy*

      I’m not sure if you’re using clowns to anonymize your industry or not but I kind of want this to be literally about clowns.

      Reply ↓
    4. Media Monkey*

      i so hope “clown” isn’t a placeholder for what you actually do and you are really in clown communications!

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  22. Hannah*

    I was working as an adjunct professor for a college that had the majority of their students attending online only. I had just saw something about adding pronouns to email signatures and such so I added my pronouns to my “about me”. New classes started and a student emailed me, they were transitioning and didn’t want to be a bother but if I was ok with it, could I please use their preferred name / pronouns? Absolutely, no problem!

    But this wasn’t a brand new concept to be transitioning and I had seen other schools allowing their online system to reflect preferred names so I went digging, surely my school with their huge online presence had a way to do that too that I could share with my student? Nothing.

    I tried the proper channels and didn’t get responses. Then I went to the Assistant Dean and wow was she on it! She had been part of a DEI committee already and was shocked that she too couldn’t find an easy way for my student to change their display name. She went digging and something better than an old paper form was “in the works” but it might be multiple semesters before it was released. So she got the old paper form and publized across the college that people should be using it. And I got to circle back to my student with a message that said I had no skin in the game as to what they chose to do but I had found better knowledge and wanted to share it.

    I was thrilled to see their preferred name show up a couple days later in all their online posting :)

    Reply ↓
    1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      Bless you. I’m not transitioning, but I got married and changed my last name, legally, SEVEN YEARS AGO and when I started going back to the community college I had attended before, they declined to change my display name in the Canvas system to match my legal name of record. Which blows my mind. I’m not asking for them to change it to a nickname or a chosen name just for funsies, though even if I was they should be able to do that, I am literally asking them to update it to match my current legal name, and they won’t do it. (If anyone knows how I can do that in Canvas myself, please do tell.)

      Reply ↓
      1. Selina Luna*

        I don’t know how to do this on mobile, but here’s how to do this on the desktop site:
        1. When you log in to Canvas, at the top left, you’ll see the word “Account.” Click on that.
        2. You’ll see a menu with the word “Profile.” Click on Profile.
        3. It will open up your profile, including your name.
        4. If your organization allows you to change your name, on the top, right you’ll see a button that says “Edit Profile” with a little picture of a pencil. Click on that.
        5. The top listing is your name. If you want to add a picture, this is also where you change that.

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    2. nonbeenary*

      This reminds me of something lovely that happened to me as a college student. I’d had my name changed with the school, so my email, student ID, etc all reflected my preferred name, but obviously some systems still had my legal name, like financial. At one point, I was involved in a project that had a tiny bit of media recognition (think a small blurb in the local paper). Someone in the administration, who I’d never met before or since, noticed they used my legal name and not my preferred name in the blurb. She couldn’t get the blurb changed since it was already published, but she did find the hole in the system that caused the issue and fixed it. Then she emailed me to let me know it would never happen again, to me or any other student on campus.
      While I personally wasn’t too bothered by the original error, it really made me feel seen and cared for as a trans student to have someone go through all that effort for me.

      Reply ↓
  23. Junior*

    I was fairly junior and had gotten the chance to work on a big project at one of our sites in another city. I was asked to be on site for two weeks – this tripled the duration of my daily commute.
    Two weeks turned into nearly three months and I regularly spent more than 12 hours at work (I was exempt). My travel expenses were not covered since HR only looked at your contractual main office.
    Our commercial manager was complimenting me on a job well done after I returned to work at the main office and she brought up the commute. I mentioned I actually lost money because of high fuel costs. She was very indignant on my behalf (I had no idea this was not okay) and marched straight into our MD’s office and demanded I would be reimbursed. It took less than a week to process and that money literally saved me from going into red on my account.

    I am glad she looked out for me.

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  24. Stepping up*

    This is from my own mom. Back in the day she was a special education teacher’s assistant, and would help pick up students on the school bus. There was a student she was very close with and one day, my mom helped her on the bus and they waved goodbye to the student’s mother and sibling. Unfortunately, while that student was at school, the family was murdered. It was truly awful.

    My parents stood up and took in the student, even looking into adoption. The extended family was available to take in the student however, so no older sibling for me. But I always thought that this was one of the greatest examples of compassion and love. My mom was unable to fix the horrific incident but in the time immediately following that she stood up and did everything she could for that student.

    (Details vague because god forbid someone recognizes this.)

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  25. Tippy*

    I was a cashier in the pharmacy at a big box store (long time ago) and we had a customer who was absolutely ugly to me. I had been called a little earlier in the day that my grandma was admitted to the hospital so I was already upset and this elderly man did not like that his insurance would not cover the amount he thought they should on his medication. I get it dude but I didn’t set the price, call them. Instead he proceeded to scream, insult and berate me in the middle of the pharmacy. My head pharmacist and also our manager came over, told the customer it was a crime to threaten a pharmacist and he considered him screaming at me counted, so he had the guy thrown out of the pharmacy. The actual store manager came over to tell my boss he couldn’t do that. Turns out he can. The pharmacy doesn’t fall under the guidance of the store so my boss told him to go f off (he did not use the abbreviation) and walked away.

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  26. gingersnap*

    Small one but still sticks with me. My former boss and I were planning a conference that was strictly invite only. A known (and annoying) consultant was having trouble getting the required executive sign off to be invited and didn’t swing it by the deadline. He finally found a newer exec to sign off and eventually weaseled his way into the conference mere days before it began, causing me (the admin) a lot of extra work. Since he couldn’t register via the online system, I had to do everything manually and unfortunately there was a typo on his name badge. Day 1 of the conference and he loses it, screaming at me about how his last name is his family’s legacy and honor, I must have a new badge for him at once, etc. I had been at the venue since about 6am and it wasn’t a typical event space so there were no printers available. My boss sees him causing a scene, leaves the VIPs she was tasked with handling, and physically put herself between me and this guy. In the calmest, yet scariest, voice I’ve ever heard, she tells him that he is never to speak to her staff that way, he has been offered a sharpie and a blank name badge, and any more discussion will result in his being asked to leave. He slunk off and she turned to me, assured me he was nuts and overreacting, and went back to the VIPs. This guy was known to be demanding and crazy so I wasn’t on the brink of tears or anything, but I was so appreciative that she shut him down before I even had to consider how to respond. I felt so supported.

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    1. The Prettiest Curse*

      10/10 to your boss. This is a nightmare scenario of mine, but fortunately I’ve never had anyone at any of my events get that upset over a name badge.

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  27. Filthy Vulgar Mercenary*

    I had a boss in a former job who was just awful – power tripping, immature, and really mean. I tried to insulate my team from him as much as possible but it wasn’t always possible. Someone new was crying in my office at least once a week about him (subordinates, peers, subordinates of my peers…).

    People were fleeing the organization left and right, which was a big deal because it was a desirable place to work.

    I tried talking to him and it went nowhere so I went over his head to his boss. When his boss did nothing, I kept finding new people to raise the issues to – grandboss, HR, EO, Chief of staff, many others. Nothing.

    Finally someone came to me and said they thought about getting into a minor car accident every morning just to avoid going in to work.

    I went back to one of the leaders and told them what I had been told, that we are utterly failing our people (as well as failing to practice what we preach since the type of work we did was wellness related), and that if someone died it was going to be their fault.

    They finally removed him! And it ‘only’ took a few months, which in my industry is lighting speed.

    I got a mediocre performance review from him as a result (he could not give me a bad one without justification but he could give me a meh one; first one I’d ever gotten in several decades that wasn’t glowing) and I could not be prouder of that.

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  28. EEB18*

    At a previous organization, I worked closely with “Jane.” I was basically one step behind her in my career – I would get promoted from assistant to associate and she would get promoted from associate to senior associate, etc.

    Jane knew I was extremely underpaid (I was hired in 2012, was very happy to get a job in my field, and didn’t negotiate). When Jane left the organization, she knew I was going to be promoted into her role. She sat me down and told me her exact salary and what her salary had been at each previous position within the organization, so I could see how underpaid I was compared to her. When I was offered the senior associate role that Jane vacated, I used my background knowledge of what she had been paid in that position to negotiate an extra $6k for myself. I absolutely would not have received that money if Jane hadn’t given me crucial information and encouraged me to push back on our manager’s initial offer.

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  29. gingersnap*

    Oooh I thought of another one.

    Another (different) conference. I worked in academia for a religious university. This conference was international and had clerics from all over the world. There was one priest who was behaving inappropriately with myself and the other female admin. We avoided him the best we could and I chalked it up to being a woman working for the church. However, said priest was a member of the same religious order as the dean of the school hosting the conference. The dean heard in passing about the behavior of this priest and was furious. The priest had already left but the dean had me and the admin send him details of our encounters and then he wrote a scathing letter to the priest’s superior expressing his anger. He cc’d us on the letter and it was ruthless. I was new to working for the church, and ended up doing about a decade of religious work, and this remains the singular time that a cleric, without being asked, stood up for the people who worked with him and called out bad behavior. If more people had been like him, I probably wouldn’t have left.

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    1. Damn it, Hardison!*

      I worked at a fast food chain in high school. One night (not long after I started to work there) a man came in to place a large order with many special requests. This was in the 1980s, so you couldn’t push a button on the register to specify “no pickles,” you had to tell the person making the food. I took the order, read it back to confirm, and within a few minutes he left with his 2 bags of food. He came storming back in yelling that his order was wrong, that I was stupid, and that women in general were useless and couldn’t even handle a brainless job like putting food in a bag. He then yelled for a manager. My manager, who was in earshot of all of this, marched over to the counter, stood as tall as she could at 5 feet, and said very loudly and forcefully, “ Sir, I AM A WOMAN.” She took the receipt from him, gave him his money back, and told him to leave the store immediately. He then tried to take the bags of food off the counter on his way out, but she grabbed them and put them in the trash, never breaking eye contact with him. It was immensely satisfying.

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      1. Medium Sized Manager*

        That genre of fast food manager is such a blessing. I once told a guy that I would cut him off if he kept calling me baby/trying to stroke my face, and my (male) manager told me that EYE was inappropriate and should have just gone along with it to avoid a complaint to corporate. He deeply regretted it when I told him corporate was welcome to write me up for not tolerating sexual harassment.

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  30. Metadata Janktress*

    Both my most recent previous boss and my current one are wonderful advocates for not letting me get assigned too many things at work, or to have to interact with external parties that are rude/difficult beyond reason. My favorite though was when I was on bereavement leave to help my husband with a death in his family. I had someone emailing me multiple times in a row about a project that wasn’t urgent, they just HAD TO KNOW the status because they were “important.” My old boss emailed back on my behalf basically telling them to stop, I was out on leave and would respond when I could. Tiny little thing, but when I was so overwhelmed with life stuff, it meant the world to me.

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  31. NotQuiteCool*

    I’ve tried to do this across my career, to advocate for people who can’t, but here is the most dramatic one.

    My first real job was in a bookstore. During my time there, the assistant manager began to secretly date an employee (there’s a very dramatic story of how we found out, but that’s for another day). This AM would give small favours to their secret partner — like the two of them going to get pizza for the team while the rest of us worked a night shift — but it was mostly small stuff.

    Then the Main Manager went on holiday for two weeks and the gloves were off. The preferred employee spent the whole time with the Assistant Manager, using temps to run her section (the biggest section of the store). She’d also strut around the store like she owned the place, with an attitude that everyone else was below her. She effectively did no work for two weeks, and it was really obvious when you looked at her section. So obvious, in fact, that the Manager came back and instantly pulled her aside to give critical feedback about her work. He didn’t know she hadn’t actually been working, he just critiqued the results.

    That talk led to the employee, with backing from the AM, making a formal complaint against the manager. She claimed that she was being harassed by him, and unfairly picked on. Other booksellers knew the truth, we had seen what the two of them were like while he was away, but what could we do?

    My solution was to secret myself away in the attic of the store and call the area manager. I was in my very early 20s, and had met this man twice in my life, and I still remember the nerves I felt making that phone call. But I felt that it was important that the area manager know the whole story, and the manager not get unfairly punished. The Area Manager thanked me for the call, promising to consider the whole story.

    The Manager wasn’t reprimanded. The Assistant Manager was moved to a different store and the employee ended up leaving. I never know how much impact my call had, but I’m very glad I did it.

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  32. AnotherAcademic*

    I was hired in at a low salary because I was too scared to negotiate properly (scared the offer would be withdrawn). Because subsequaent raises were based on the intial pay (say, a 2% raise), my salary continued to be well below market value. When I asked my boss for help getting a fairer salary, he refused–but *his* boss stepped up, got me a significant raise, and got it back-paid for six months. She didn’t have to use political capital on my behalf, but she did, because she wanted to make things right.

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  33. Jules the 3rd*

    I worked in a large open office space for IBM – about a hundred people in 4′ high cubes. We heard all the conversations or phone calls around us. I sat on an aisle, and my neighbor across the way was one of those guys. Over 50 (about my age), liked to make people laugh, cared some about the topics he used (ie, not racial or anti-woman, IBM is good about picking people who are not hateful like that, at least in my experience) but that’s as far as he’d grown. ‘Kids these days’ were one joking topic, for example.

    One day, he reported a fact that was new and stunning to him: 20% of American adults had a mental illness! He made a couple of mild jokes about it. About ten people heard him; on average, two of us would have had a mental illness. I am one of the two – OCD diagnosed and under treatment. Very few people at work knew that, and he was not one of them and never would have been, in the normal way of things.

    Later that day, he had a call with an unpleasant customer. In the course of complaining, he said, “Well, SHE is CLEARLY one of the 20%. What a jerk!” I was flushed and scared but managed to get out, “Ya know, I am actually one of the 20%. OCD. Could you maybe not equate bad behavior with being mentally ill? That makes it harder on us.” He apologized and stopped talking. I nodded an ok and went back to my work.

    It was… a touch awkward between us after that for a few weeks, but he and his wife had been complaining about being required to come back to the office, so when they stopped coming in, I assumed he retired. Not a bad person, but.

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    1. Jules the 3rd*

      ps: yes, I am finally saying the name of the ‘fortune 500’ company for whom I worked. I got laid off from there earlier this year when they closed down the part of manufacturing that I supported. After four nervous months, I found a new job that I like very much and that I am well-suited to do.

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    2. Paint N Drip*

      Good for you bringing it up!
      I swear people of that age range SO often need to be reminded that ‘otherness’ is all around them. My boss is an old guy like that and historically just not “with it” – but he is continuously trying to learn and be open-minded. No, depression isn’t sadness. No, autism isn’t only found in mental institutions. Yes, mentally ill people are all around us as coworkers and neighbors. No, being 100% healthy isn’t a given and you can’t always see it. If you’re up for it, I think that sharing what’s going on with you can really change the minds of people like this – saying ‘this is what OCD looks like’ can be an extremely powerful move.

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      1. Edwina*

        I didn’t think the age range can be blamed for people not understanding that lots of other people are different from them. I’m 61, and I’m part of a lot of the categories that some people are oblivious about.

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  34. WeirdChemist*

    A story from my dad! His office was hiring for an internal promotion and he was on the hiring committee. My dad asked his assistant to black out all of the identifying information on the applicants resumes so he could make his recommendations blind. When he met with the rest of the hiring committee, his suggested applicants were… significantly more diverse than the the rest of the committee. My dad chose to specifically champion one applicant, who the rest of the committee admired they “didn’t notice how strong her background was” (read, probably didn’t bother with her resume that closely) but they allowed her to interview, where she knocked it out of the park and was offered the job. Several years later, she was kicking butt in the role and the guy the rest of the hiring committee wanted for the job “because he was due” had been fired for misconduct… oppsies!

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  35. Medium Sized Manager*

    My mom is that person in many ways. One of my favorites is not from when we had hockey season tickets years and years ago. For those who have not been, it get really loud, especially when the home team scores a goal. There was a ~4-5 year old kid in front of us, and he spent the first period in a little ball plugging his ears as hard as he could. During intermission, my mom tracked down guest services and got him some ear plugs, and it was a whole new kid – he was jumping and shouting for the game like everybody else. Apparently, it was their first game, and his parent didn’t know that a) it was REALLY loud and b) guest services had free options, so they were really grateful. I like to think my mom helped that little kid develop a lifelong love of hockey that day.

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  36. Kowalski! Options!*

    I think I’ve told this story, but I’ll tell it again…

    Over 30 years ago, I was a working vacationer in the UK, and got a number of temp jobs because I could type really quickly in English and French. I got sent to a small real estate age near Notting Hill – the owner needed someone to fill in for a week, and for the most part, it was straightforward secretarial stuff – phones, typing.

    On the fourth day, a woman called, demanding to speak to the owner, and she was very vocal and very rude. I was taken back by the volume, more than anything – she was so loud that the owner of the agency could hear her across the room.

    “Put her on hold,” he said. So I did.

    He then took a deep breath, picked up the receiver, took the call off and proceeded to bellow into the phone “DON’T YOU TALK TO MY SECRETARY THAT WAY. NOT NOW. NOT EVER.”

    I’ve been working in offices for over forty years and no one has ever defended me or come to my aid as quickly and decisively as that man did.

    Wherever you are, thank you.

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  37. Nightengale*

    This was a joint effort

    The year was 2006 and the H1N1 (bird flu) was raging. I was a resident in a pediatric ICU and we had the sickest kids in the state and shortages in PPE. The rapid flu tests for people with H1N1 were all coming back negative so we were behind getting treatment started. I came in one morning and was handed the phone by the resident who had worked overnight and was supposed to stay for rounds. Except that her follow-up flu test taken earlier in the week had just come back positive. I greeted the attending doctor with “I sent [sick resident] home with flu and the vaccine is now in employee health!” He brought the whole team down to get vaccinated before rounds.

    Except they wouldn’t vaccinate our student. We had a senior student rotating with us who was taking care of the same sick kids and at just as high a risk as the employees. But she wasn’t an employee so she couldn’t get the vaccine through employee health. And student health didn’t have the vaccine yet. Most students weren’t at high risk of exposure but our student was.

    That afternoon another senior doctor came in who I knew was on the infectious disease committee. I let him know that our student couldn’t get vaccinated due to this loophole/policy. To this day I am not sure exactly who said what to whom but he took her down the back staircase and she came back vaccinated.

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  38. Selina Luna*

    I don’t know if this counts, but I frequently stop fellow teachers from intentionally misgendering students. That’s bullying, and I won’t put up with it. And if you’re wondering why they’re allowed to get away with that, welcome to rural America.

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    1. Paint N Drip*

      That definitely counts. You’re awesome!! Those kids will remember you fondly (they’ll remember the other teachers too, but they’ll remember you stood up for them)

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  39. Nobody Special*

    I was a newly hired C-suite leader in a large nonprofit with some really problematic power dynamics, particularly with the super grouchy CFO; he was nasty, ignored anything that inconvenienced him, and everyone in the administrative office was terrified of him. A few weeks into my time there, one of his sweet, bubbly and well-loved fiscal analyst employees was notified that her ex-husband, the father of her three kids, had unexpectedly passed away. While they were no longer close, she was super concerned about how her kids would react and desperately wanted to go home to be with them before they got the news from social media. Grouchy CFO wouldn’t let her. There was an upcoming deadline of hers for that evening only he could sign off on, and he was refusing to even look at it, saying “I’ll get to that by the end of day, you can wait”. She tried to explain the situation to him, but he wouldn’t budge. My office was across the hall from Super Grouchy CFO, so she drifted in, collapsed into a chair, and started crying. I felt awful for her. Our always-absent CEO wasn’t there to do anything. I knocked on CFO’s door, but he wouldn’t get up to respond to me. So I went and got the spare key and let myself into his office, asking him to finish the task they were working on so she could go home. He was belligerent and shouted at me that he would get to it when he would get to it, to mind my own business and to get the &$#@ out of his office. I marched right up to him as he sat on his computer (playing solitaire, no less) and said “I have decided that this is my absolute top priority for the day, so I will stand right here and give you all the support you need, until you are able to finish this task and she can go home.” I then stood right next to him, silently, for about 10 minutes while he huffed and sputtered at me. He got so irritated that he grabbed the documents, signed them, and then shouted “FINE, JUST GO AWAY”. The sweet analyst was so grateful and relieved, she rushed off to her car and sped home to her kids. It’s been 15 years since then. She and I are still the best of friends.

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  40. trailing spouse*

    My husband was the VP of operations at a small tech company, second in command to the owner (who was not a good dude). The owner sucked at running a business and decided he needed to lay off all the staff except my husband, who would help him rebuild. He was too chicken to do the layoffs himself and made my husband do it. Husband successfully fought for notice + severance for these employees and called recruiters himself to help them get placements.

    So husband lays off 14 people in individual meetings over two weeks, and on the second Friday can’t find the owner. Eventually the owner materializes at the end of the day and lays off my husband, effective that day. No severance. Husband also discovers that owner had backdated the last day of employment for a bunch of folks so that he would not have to pay their health insurance for December (one found out because the doctor’s office called to tell him his kids wouldn’t be covered the next week). Husband threatened to report the owner for small business tax fraud among other things, and after sending us a bunch of nasty letters from a disbarred lawyer, owner suddenly restored insurance.

    And now husband is without a job or severance — in December, when no one is really hiring. But then! The mother of one of his former employees, who was an IT manager in a very large company in town, was so grateful for how husband treated her daughter that she created a new position for him on her team, called their recruiters and directed them to fast track him, and gave him a raise. This all happened within two weeks. Basically my husband saved Christmas for a handful of families, and then one of them saved it for us.

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  41. Cwaeth*

    Years ago I was working on an international production. Somehow, my name was left off of the list of contributors. I was disappointed, but didn’t want to make a fuss about it. My boss stepped in and insisted that I be included before it went public. He said I should always get credit for my work. I was grateful then – and I now am indeed insistent about receiving credit for my contributions!

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  42. Riggs*

    I worked for an engineering firm and was participating in a field test where operators would be required to periodically change batteries and download data from our sensors every 8 hours. I realized that while I was going to be essentially co-located with my system, other folks would have to drive over an hour each way. When I brought this up to the PM he responded that they can sleep for 5 hours and then take naps later. I told him this was not okay, especially considering people would be driving in very remote places in the dark. A little while later I learned that the systems had been updated to have batteries that would last for 16 hours rather than 8!

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  43. Butterfly Counter*

    I teach at a university and I have a PhD. Yes, I’m bragging, but it’s also important for the story.

    When I first started part time teaching, I got $XXXX per credit hour for that semester because I had a PhD. Basically, I was the top end of the salary band due to my education.

    The next semester, I saw that I was $WWWW per credit hour. I mentioned it to my chair, thinking it was because I was teaching a different class, but he flipped out and got me back my appropriate salary. The problem was that I got re-isssued back to $WWWW every semester and I had to make a stink about being on the higher salary band.

    When I got hired full time, something similar happened. I don’t know if it was something to do with my name or if someone in payroll just had it out for me randomly, my salary would be reset at the beginning of every semester to the lowest salary available despite raises and other salary bumps over the years.

    But then we got a new department coordinator. She was aghast that this kept happening to me. Not only did she ream out payroll the second time my pay was reset under her watch, but she personally oversaw that they awarded me any back pay that was “missed” over the years. She’s been here four years now and my salary hasn’t been reset for the past 3 and a half.

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  44. H*

    This is a story from my late father. Many decades ago, my dad worked for a US company based in the Northeast, with a subsidiary based in the pre-Civil-Rights South.

    The only Black employee at the subsidiary was the janitor. The subsidiary adhered to Jim Crow segregation policies (ugh) and refused to allow the janitor to use the men’s restroom. Clean it, yes. Use it himself, no.

    My dad’s boss (a big VIP) learned of this situation on one of his first trips South to the subsidiary. The VIP stopped using the (white) men’s restroom and peed in the sink in the janitorial closet, same as the janitor, during his visits to meet with management.

    That segregated-bathroom policy ended right quick. My dad was full of admiration for his boss.

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    1. Irish Teacher.*

      Your dad’s boss was utterly and completely awesome.

      And yikes, they expected the janitor to pee in the sink. That is horrible.

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  45. Former Manager*

    I had been on a job that had become increasingly toxic and unbearable due to my manager (HR was not supportive despite the volume of documentation that I provided to them). Not surprisingly, I left and took a new job at a new employer.

    During my very first week at New Job, we got a pretty bad snowstorm. It was still snowing when I got up to go to work, but I got ready anyway and headed out because Toxic OldBoss did not believe in weather delays. As I was pulling out of my driveway, my new manager texted me and said, “Please work from home today. I don’t want you to risk coming in on these roads. Lease just call or text me anytime with questions.”

    I still love my new manager and my job almost 2 years after that interaction (and yes, my Toxic OldBoss was fired in a particularly awesome fashion about a year after I left. One of my old mentors texted me about it 10 minutes after it went down).

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  46. TrixieRose*

    When I was a younger lawyer (~5 years out of law school), I was at a huge hearing with tons of other lawyers. We had to take a break in the hearing to sort through a ton of motion papers and organize them for the court. One opposing counsel, with whom I had already had a few ugly run-ins (see below), asked me to go make copies for him, to which I responded “I’m not your secretary.” His response was “obviously not, because she’s younger and hotter.” I was speechless. But my first-year associate, George – who was older than me age-wise, but had only been working as a lawyer for 9 months – immediately said “You’re going to apologize to her, right?” Surprise – he did not! George then told the three male partners, and one male client, who were with us in the courtroom what had happened. They all made it clear later that what had happened was incredibly inappropriate and that they 100% had my back.

    Prior run-in: opposing counsel had called me after I sent a letter about his client’s discovery problems (which is completely routine) and SCREAMED at me, saying how dare I send such a letter, that it was completely inappropriate, that this case was pending in the Midwest and this is not how people behave in the Midwest. Well game on: I had grown up in the Midwest, gone to college in the Midwest, so I told him that he didn’t need to educate me on how to behave like a Midwesterner, to which he replied “Well if that’s true then you’ve been WARPED by New York.” I was so shaken after this that I called my two office besties, crying, who immediately came to my office and helped me compose an email recounting his behavior. (Did I mention he had also screamed at my secretary?) And then the next day, these friends put two giant cardboard cutouts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Spike in my office with speech bubbles saying “Warped” and “Very Warped.” Setting aside that it scared the daylights out of me when I turned the office light on, it was an awesome thing to do.

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  47. Leela*

    I’m still mad about this, so even though I did the righting I’m going to share it.

    I work in job that serves indigent members of the public so we frequently have people in all kinds of mental/physical/emotional states arrive at our office. Simultaneously, when people are promoted into management they are no longer in direct service and usually view this as an opportunity to completely ramp down how much they work. We are open to the public 8:30-5:30. What this means is there are frequently times in the morning/evening where there’s no managers or supervisors in the office. As is so often the case our HR is actively problematic.

    One day I was in the office a little after 5 and a colleague came by to tell me that a person was creating a problem at the front desk with our admin staff. I’m the most senior person in the office that I see, so I go up to check it out. There is a person berating my colleague at reception, unfortunately this is not unexpected. But infuriatingly, our HR manage is standing on the other side of the lobby just WATCHING this. Not intervening, not assisting, just…watching. She then watches me tell this person I’m a supervising attorney, he needs to leave, and then escort him out of the building. At no point does HR check with me or my colleague if we’re ok.

    Afterwards my colleague emailed all the supervisors/management to 1) highlight the problem and 2) ward of what we both thought my come from HR: me getting in trouble for “lying” about being a supervisor.

    Multiple managers/supervisors thanked me for intervening. They still don’t stay until the office closes. HR never spoke to me or my colleague. We do get recommendations for meditation events to fix our burnout…

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  48. Manon*

    I have been the grateful recipient of generous mentoring in my career, and I’m finally in a position to pay it forward a bit, so I’m very much enjoying the newfound power. I also have the AAM community to thank for the low-key but constant reminders about what is reasonable and fair in the workplace.
    I’m the department head of student services at a high school. I am currently dying on a hill regarding compulsory community volunteer hours. One of the (admittedly murky) rules about the volunteer work is that you cannot volunteer for a for-profit business. (They should be paying students for their work! We will not enable labor exploitation!)
    We counsel students to go back to these employers and ask to be paid for their work. Understandably, few of them have the nerve to do this, but I was thrilled when one day a student popped into my office to let me know that she had spoken with the business owner and was going to be paid retroactively for the work she had done! I was so proud of her.
    So thank you AAM friends: you’ve given me the courage to let my pigheaded side loose

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  49. kiri*

    This is one that is really a “white colonialist society doing the bare minimum to right generational wrongs” sort of thing – but I’m also really proud of my mom for it. She was a public high school teacher for 30 years at a small, rural high school whose longtime mascot was an anti-indigenous slur (shared by the Washington Football Team). In the late 90’s, she was a leader of a movement to change the mascot – she led meetings with members of our local Native nations and town community members, spoke in school board meetings, and took a TON of heat from the “it’s really a sign of respect” and “we don’t like change” crowd. I remember being vaguely embarrassed by it as a tween – she would cover up the school’s logo on her school-issued planner, that sort of thing. But the movement succeeded, and looking back I’m SO proud to say she was a part of it!

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    1. ThatGirl*

      My high school had that same mascot through …. about 10 years ago, which is REALLY unfortunate. But they finally changed it. And then I got an email from the alumni association that they’re fundraising by selling t-shirts and other things with the old name/mascot on it.

      I do not know if anything will change, but I wrote a polite but firm email that I was not okay with this, that there had to be other ways to raise funds, and that I didn’t really CARE if other alumni wanted those shirts, it was Not Okay.

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  50. Medium Sized Manager*

    Also had to share a story from when my husband worked retail – he is a 6 foot tall white guy with a beard and perma-frown, so he’s a little intimidating if you don’t know him. In contrast, all of his coworkers were a) short, b) women, and c) not white, so he was regularly the “enforcer” if somebody was rude. My personal favorite is when somebody was reaming his coworker because there was a line and she “had a flight to catch.” He interrupted with “it’s an airport. Everybody is here for a flight,” and she magically had time to patiently wait in line.

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  51. Me, Myself, and Irene*

    The summer after my freshman year of college, I was enrolled in a public speaking course. It was required for graduation. After my first attempt at a speech for a class assignment, the instructor was devastatingly unkind in his public feedback, including telling me that I had failed. I did my best not to cry in front of everyone, but I’m sure that they noticed how upset I was. At the next class, the professor publicly apologized to me for the way he had spoken to me. I found out later that close to the entire class (it was summer, so a small group) banded together, went to his office, and scolded him.

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  52. Catgirl*

    I worked in a laboratory and the building for some ridiculous reason turned on and off the heating by the calendar, not the temperature. On this particular day it was freezing cold outside but because the calendar showed it was spring the building wasn’t heated and the lab was 15’C (59’F). Our team was mostly young women. Our manager, an older Scottish man, came into the lab and asked how things were going. One of the women mentioned the lab was cold and a male team member said “Just like a woman, always complaining.” Our manager snapped “That kind of comment is totally unacceptable. We do not tolerate that sort of thing here!” We were delighted.

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  53. Anonymous Law Grad*

    When I was in law school, my civil procedure class was taught by a federal judge who had a well-known reputation for being a creepy lech. (Like, he married his law clerk and was still creeping on the secretaries.) Somehow, I had attracted the attention of this creeper, but I didn’t really know what to do about him, since his behavior toward me wasn’t overt. He called on me in class every class period for nine weeks straight. I just thought that he was being a jerk. But a guy in my class, who was an older student (about my father’s age) making a career change approached me one day, let me know he knew what was up and that he would put a stop to it but not to ask any follow-up questions.

    Creepy judge professor never bothered me again. I have no idea what my classmate said to him, but I’m grateful.

    On the upside, because I got called on with such frequency, I made sure I was extra prepared for class that semester. I know civil procedure inside and out, which helps me out a lot now that I’m a judge.

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  54. Sylvia*

    This one is about a beloved former supervisor. Our workplace had a monthly tradition of each department taking turns hosting a potluck and bringing dishes for the other departments to enjoy. My turd department manager not only forgot that it was happening that day, but forgot that it was our turn, so he decided that everyone needed to give him $15 immediately so we could buy pizza for the potluck. (This was back in the early 2000s, so $15 was more like $25 or $30.)

    I was probably the lowest paid person in the department, my husband was chronically unemployed, and I had two little kids in day care. Also, we got paid once a month and it was the last week before payday. That $15 was our food budget for that week. I had no idea what I was going to do and was so ashamed of my situation. I told my immediate supervisor, Jane, and she paid my portion of the pizza. Afterwards, she hid two leftover boxes of pizza before anyone else could take them, and told me to take them home to my family. I’ve never forgotten Jane!

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  55. Anon for this one*

    My mom.

    When she was pregnant with me, she was a surgical resident working acute care & trauma rotations. She requested to be moved to less strenuous hours. Leadership tried to move her to a ‘fluffier’ rotation (I don’t recall which, exactly) and framed it as accommodation for the reduced hours. This would have significantly negatively impacted her career. She told them hell no, stayed in the trauma and acute care rotations, and kicked serious butt until I was born, then came back from maternity leave and continued kicking serious butt. She then absolutely insisted on finding and working a part time job and ever since then has really pushed back on leadership making her work unreasonable hours (her ‘part time’ is 36 hours a week in 12 hour shifts at a time – full time is more like 60+ hours). Her whole life has been pushing back in her own small way on the idea that being a surgeon requires you to be doing your job 150% of the time and completely alienated from any human contact as a result.

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    1. Anon for this one*

      And I’ve only just realized I missed the prompt slightly – mea culpa! I should have added that ever since then she’s been a huge advocate for getting the other members of her groups the same sort of support she would have wanted. She even attempted to get a prior group to unionize after hospital admin started asking for some really absurd things – staff cuts that would have made hours almost punitively long and significantly lowered patient care standards. That fell through, unfortunately, so she’s moved to a different hospital and continues to be whatever the opposite of a doormat is for admin.

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  56. Wilma Flinstone*

    in the 90s: SVP liked to pinch the cheeks of the woman with whom I shared my office. She flinched every time, but didn’t say anything. One day SVP tried the same with me. Having grown up with brothers, reflexes took over. He got a backhand to bat his arm away and a shout “Don’t EVER do that!!” Since we were among many others in our department, SVP was super embarrassed and apologized profusely. No cheeks were ever pinched again.

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  57. Pottery Yarn*

    I used to volunteer in the hospital ER. One evening, a teen from a nearby summer camp came in with one of the college-age camp counselors because half of the fleshy part of his ear was kinda dangling off after a freak accident at camp. The teen did not want to get stitches, and even called his parents (pre-iPhone/FaceTime) and kept telling them it wasn’t that bad and he was fine. The camp counselor did not know how to persuade him otherwise and his parents were leaning toward letting him go without treatment, so I stepped out of the room, grabbed the first doctor I could find (head of the department), and said he needed to come with me NOW and tell this teen’s parents that he needed stitches. Sure enough, he took one look at the teen’s ear, took the phone, and told his parents that he definitely needed stitches. Turns out, the teen was afraid of needles, which is what was driving him to try to get out of having the procedure, but he survived and now his ear is intact, lol.

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  58. Czech Mate*

    Also from my mom: for years, she was a nonprofit VP. President of the org was abusive and awful in all of the ways that it’s possible to be. She was eventually fired, and the board instituted my mom as interim President.

    My mom knew that the staff was burned out, tired, frustrated, worried about what would come next, etc. She said that as interim President, her biggest goal was taking care of everyone’s mental health. Her first actions were to:
    -Close the office for one hour each day to give everyone a full lunch break,
    -Have 1:1 meetings with every single employee about how they were doing, what their concerns were, and what they wanted to see change in the org,
    -Allocate resources to support employee professional development

    The board unfortunately decided not to keep my mom as the President permanently (that’s another story) but many of those employees have since reached out to my mom to say that she was the best boss they’d ever had.

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  59. ghostlight*

    I worked at a very seasonal theatre company (super busy in the summer, still some programming in the fall, but way less intense), and I was going on a trip over a long weekend with my best friend/coworker, and we realized that our trip could be extended if we had Veteran’s Day off that Monday. Problem was, our company recognized very few holidays, even in our off-season.

    My friend and I (admittedly for our own selfish reasons) both played dumb and asked our managers if we had Veteran’s Day off, and they then checked with the managing director, who ended up reevaluating the holiday policy entirely. We ended up securing several more paid holidays off for the entire staff!

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  60. RLC*

    Years ago our small work unit was hit with an extraordinary complex and time consuming emergency project. Staff detailed in from other units to help, very much an all-hands-on-deck situation for weeks on end. After the project wrapped, all but two participating staff received large cash awards…we got t-shirts. Our boss was HORRIFIED and tried unsuccessfully to get compensation for us too.
    So he did the next best thing: hosted a barbecue at his home for his team and their families and presented us with lovely gifts (purchased with his own money) to thank us for our efforts. A small gesture that made us feel recognized and valued for our hard work.

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  61. CeeBee*

    Alison – you are one of my favorite right someone else’s wrong. You have helped so many people empower themselves, amplify others’ voices, and have been a voice of reason. So many people writing in, saying, is this banana-pants or what? and you affirming them — chef’s kiss!

    May your Mom’s memory always be a comfort and bring a smile to your face.

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  62. Lab Rat*

    An outgoing manager burnt a ton of bridges with us. Our interim manager asked what could be done and people were a little afraid to approach him (he is super nice btw).

    I organized some of my more timid coworkers, coached them on how to approach him with their grievances and for those who were too timid, they allowed me to air grievances by naming situations and not necessarily names.

    I have coached people on their rights with regards to our provincial and federal human rights acts with regards to discrimination and disability and armed with that knowledge people have been able to push for their own needs.

    Now everyone wants me to be a union steward and I said if I was nominated I wouldn’t turn it down.

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  63. AnonyNurse*

    Not sure if this counts, because I was ‘wronging’ myself. About 15 years ago, when I was a new grad nurse, I made a medication error. I gave a pill intended for one patient to another patient. While the errant drug was pretty innocuous and posed minimal risk to the patient, it is still a NEVER event. I was, and still am, horrified at this mistake. Yes, there were systems issues that contributed to why I made the error, but in the end it was on me.

    I was sobbing as I self-reported my error to the resident responsible for the patient. That hospital and that unit were known for being pretty toxic, with lots of bullying. I expected to be ripped to shreds.

    She looked at me and said, “If you weren’t human, you wouldn’t make mistakes.” She went with me to talk to the patient. I explained what had happened, the resident reassured the patient that there’d be no ill effects. I’d stopped crying by then, but my face was still puffy and red, so there was no hiding it. The patient patted me on the hand and said, “it’s ok, dear. Just look after me extra tonight.”

    I work in public health now and don’t do patient care. But “if you weren’t human, you wouldn’t make mistakes” has become something of a quiet mantra to myself, and one that I share with others when they need it. I don’t remember the residents name, but I remember her kindness to me that night, and the gentleness of the patient. Getting kind of misty eyed thinking of it now.

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  64. jane's nemesis*

    I had a junior colleague, Mary, who had horrible stage fright. She was terrified of the spotlight.

    At our office holiday luncheon, we had this funny colleague, Barry, who always did all the patter while he was emceeing the raffle drawing that was done to raise money for charity. He’d make funny jokes and had volunteer assistants to help pull tickets and pass out the baskets. The first Christmas party that Mary worked on my team (I had worked with her before and recommended her for the job, we were pretty close), we were standing in line to get drinks at the start of the luncheon with this older colleague on our team, Jane, who announced that she had volunteered Mary to be one of Barry’s assistants! Mary turned white as a sheet and looked like she was going to throw up.

    I pulled Jane aside and said she needed to fix this, that Mary couldn’t be Barry’s assistant. She looked confused but said okay….

    We proceeded with lunch, with Mary looking like she was going to cry with dread through the whole thing. I was trying to reassure her, saying Jane said she’d fix it, but she was doubtful.

    Sure enough, when it was time for Barry to start the raffle drawings, he tried to call Mary up over the microphone! I shot Jane the absolutely dirtiest look I could muster and jumped up quickly and said “oh, Mary’s not feeling well, I’ll help instead!” and rushed up. Luckily everyone proceeded as though nothing had happened and eventually I forgave Jane, who just did NOT understand Mary’s phobia. But Mary never felt comfortable at another holiday party.

    The real happy ending is that a few years ago, Mary got treatment for her social anxiety and can now comfortably do something like this! It’ll never be her favorite thing but it no longer causes panic attacks.

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  65. No Mercy*

    My Mom started work at a new law firm late in her career as a legal assistant. One of the first files she worked on was a case involving a young man who was driving a company vehicle when it rolled in a catastrophic accident. He became a paraplegic with a brain injury that prevented him from holding a full time job for the foreseeable future, if not the rest of his life. The other tragedy is choosing the lawyer my Mom was working for as his representation for his insurance claim. The lawyer was fairly new in her career but had already gone through a number of assistants before Mom arrived as she had a propensity to go over the same documents multiple times with her red pen and send them back for editing without actually moving forward with anything of importance. Thus this young man was stuck in a holding pattern waiting for insurance money or any kind of income as the lawyer did her usual red pen edit routine with the paperwork. My Mom took the calls from this man for weeks, trying to soothe his anxiety and do her best to get the ball rolling only to be blocked by her incompetent boss on every level with more inane edits on routine documentation. Finally my Mom made a decision. She was very nervous as she had never gone behind an employer’s back to help a client (she never had to!) and she felt a wave of disloyalty and fear at being caught. She took a deep breath and stuffed that down and started making phone calls to various government departments. She expedited the paperwork herself that would get him benefits through the government while he waited for the outcome of the insurance claim. Before long he was receiving cheques to support himself and thanking her from the bottom of his heart. Mom was so disgusted by the lawyer, she quit that job but she may have advised this young man to look into getting new representation before she left.

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  66. Annisele*

    My employer once made a new rule that very junior staff couldn’t ask questions of senior staff who weren’t their direct manager. Up until that point we’d all just asked our questions of whoever we thought was appropriate, but once the rule was introduced junior people had to ask their manager and then have the manager approach the senior person – there was to be no direct contact between the junior staff and the senior people. We didn’t have that many senior staff, and the point was to use their time well and make sure we only used them for genuinely difficult issues.
    I thought the rule was completely ridiculous, so the next time a senior person said good morning to me I said “I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to talk to you any more” (to my shame I was a little rude). Said senior person went away looking extremely confused.
    A month later I had a huge pay rise and a promotion. I didn’t find out why for years, but it turned out the senior person had asked questions, found out about both the new policy and my grade, and gone ballistic over the fact I was as junior as I was (I worked with him quite often but I wasn’t in his management line, and he’d assumed I was paid far more than I actually was). He’d made all sorts of noise about me being both the only woman in my department and the person with the lowest pay, and that was the reason HR had promoted me. He also made HR look at the salaries of the relatively small number of other women in my division, and many of them got pay rises too.
    The senior person never told me about any of that; I found out from somebody in HR after the HR rep left the company.

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  67. just passing through*

    I (she/her) was working in an conservative industry and my usually wonderful grandboss made a mildly sexist comment to me, meaning it as a compliment that he was passing along from a new hire I’d trained (think: playing into a mostly positive female stereotype). I wasn’t sure if my (male) manager would open to me raising it, but after sitting on it a few days and rehearsing a bunch of ways to explain why it was sexist, I eventually brought it up with him. Rather than me having to go on the defense to explain myself, he just immediately got it and understood why it had made me uncomfortable. I was so relieved. He talked with the grandboss and the new hire who had made the original comment about why it was inappropriate, got apologies from them and then asked me how I wanted to proceed from there, giving me a few options of things he could do on my behalf if I wanted to take it further (I didn’t). It wasn’t the kind of thing that had a material impact on me, but it at least set the precedent that those kinds of comments did not have a place on our team. That manager made me feel so supported.

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  68. Mouse named Anon*

    This is very small in comparison to others but I have never forgot it.

    When I was 16 I got a job in a shoe store. It was one of my first jobs and it was kind of a culture shock to me. I was also not used to working on my feet, so I by the end of my 6-8 hour shifts I was exhausted. One particular Saturday we were doing alot of restock, inventory and heavy lifting. I got there super early. By noon, I was ravenous (during my childhood and teens i had alot of trouble regulating my blood sugar, I would shake uncontrollably and had terrible brain fog if I was hungry). For some reason our district manager was in. My store manager told me to take a break, he could see I was visibly shaking and hungry. The DM looked me dead in the face and said, ” No breaks today, get back to work”. My store manager brought me aside and headed me ten bucks. He said “Go get lunch and take a break I’ll deal with DM”. As I was leaving, I could hear him say ” DM, she’s 16 and needs a break… Shes going, whether you like it or not”. I am almost 40 and I still remember it. Wish I remembered my manager’s name.

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  69. Dana Lynne*

    I am proud of something I did to help fellow instructors. At my last college, several of my colleagues were meekly agreeing to basically work for free when teaching what are called “overload” classes in addition to our regular teaching load. Besides being illegal, the practice apparently was pushed on them through guilt and admonitions to help out and be a team player.

    I refused to do it, talked back to our boss the dean and his guilt trip, pointed out it was illegal and openly encouraged all my colleagues to do the same. It was a shame how cowed some of them were!

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  70. girlie_pop*

    In my last job, I worked primarily with salespeople in a conservative, kind of old-school industry, and as a result, a lot of the salespeople were old-school and conservative themselves. They didn’t like change or learning new things, which I could mostly work around, but it was very frustrating at times.

    Once, I was working on a client-facing document with a salesperson. Even after I showed him how to make comments on a PDF and he commented how easy it was, he refused to do it and insisted I make changes from notes he hand-wrote on printed-out copies of the document. This resulted in me staying late a few nights in a row trying to decipher his handwriting, which was…not great, and make updates to the document.

    We got the project done, and it was successful, but when my boss heard about the hand-written-changes thing, she told me to email him and tell him he couldn’t do that anymore and that he needed to provide typed comments on Word or PDF documents. He emailed me back, basically blowing me off and, in so many words, saying, “I’m the salesperson here, and I don’t have to do what you tell me.” It was a pretty rude email and I was honestly a little bit shocked.

    My boss’ cubicle was right behind me, so she heard me give a defeated laugh and asked what was wrong. When I told her, she pointed at the pile of marked-up copies sitting on my desk (which, no exaggeration, was probably half a ream of paper) and asked if that was all of his changes. I said yes, and she picked them up and walked away in the direction of his office. Half an hour later, she came back and said, “He’s going to use comments on PDFs moving forward, and if he tries to do anything else, just tell me, and I’ll deal with it.”

    And she was right, he did use comments on PDFs moving forward instead of hand written changes! But he was always pretty cold and unkind to me until I left, I assume because he resented me “telling” on him. I didn’t really care though, as long as I didn’t have to take a late train home because I was sitting in my cubicle trying to read his chicken scratch anymore!

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  71. Veryanon*

    This one isn’t work related, but it’s one of my favorite stories.

    A few years ago, my daughter was in high school and she spear-headed an effort to get the school district to provide free feminine hygiene products in the restrooms. She had to do a presentation to the school board, (which was comprised mostly of middle aged white guys) and when one person said, we can’t do that because people will steal them, she said “well, if they’re stealing tampons, they must really need them, don’t you think?”
    She got the school board to agree, and now the governor of our state (PA) is touting the fact that he’s made free feminine products available in all public schools. I like to think she inspired him. :)

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  72. Pink Pony Club*

    I worked at a non-profit. I wasn’t making great money, but I loved the work, my boss and colleagues. At some point they hired in a new HR person, who was really struggling. I noticed my pay check was higher that it should have been. I looked and saw that my insurance for myself and my family wasn’t taken out. I alerted HR and they said it would be fixed by the next check. The next check it happened again, and then again. Finally, something was fixed, and 3 insurance payments would have been taken out of my next check, which basically meant I wouldn’t get one. My boss was livid and went to the CEO. The CEO was also livid and quite mortified this happened. He asked the HR director to basically eat the cost of everyone it happened to. Citing it was the right thing to do. I don’t know why or how (being the directive came from the CEO) but the HR director wouldn’t do it.

    My boss (with the CEO’s blessing) basically somehow overrode the system. He basically was able to submit for a one-time bonus in the amount of my insurance so it was a wash.

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  73. Web of Pies*

    My first real job out of college was wildly underpaid, but I didn’t know/know any better. Eventually, a teammate got promoted into a management role, thus getting access to everyone’s salaries. She pulled me into a meeting like “omg TAKE THIS RAISE NOW” it was like a 40% bump. <3

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  74. Holy Discrimination, Batman!*

    My mom’s former pastor and former church secretary having been caught … ministering to each other …. her church was looking for a new pastor, who would hire a new secretary, and mom was filling in as the temporary secretary. She was head of the women’s circle so she was on the pastoral search committee, and as acting secretary she was the person printing out the applications and getting them ready for the search committee.

    The first meeting, the head of the search committee threw out all applications that weren’t obviously white men. He told mom that when she prepped the applications, she was to make two piles – one of women and “foreign sounding” people, and the “important” pile that she would bring to the meeting.

    So for all future meetings, mom the secretary would make two piles as instructed, and put the “important” pile in the locked lower drawer of the desk to protect its importance, leaving the “unimportant” pile on top of the desk while she went to lunch. After lunch she’d go to the search committee, but she’s forgotten to take the applications with her, and she’s a retired old lady and could one of the younger people please go get the applications, she left some on top of the desk ….

    Church got a lady pastor of color. Head of the search committee transferred to the next parish over in protest. Mom the secretary got a kick out of telling him that yes, she’s transferred his membership records … and she’s sure he’ll love his new church, since Pastor Kevin and his husband have a welcome dinner for new parishioners the first Sunday of every month!

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  75. ragazza*

    This isn’t mine, but a friend who is not white found out that two white men she worked at who had the same level of job responsibilities as her were both making more money than she was—and she was more qualified (had a higher degree, etc). The company gave her a huge raise when she pointed it out, although really that should not happen in the first place.

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  76. librarian in waiting*

    My mom was a high school teacher who looked as young as the kids she was teaching. Her sister was still in high school, but a different one than my mom taught at. Sister’s best friend was being relentlessly bullied for her looks. My mom heard about it and told them both to go to a local restaurant after school that all the kids hung out at and to pretend not to know her.

    Sister and friend were there, so were the bullies. Bullies started bullying and my mom walked up to the biggest one, spit in her face and basically told her not to mess with friend any more or she’d be back. She absolutely would have been fired from her job (and maybe should have been?) had anyone realized she wasn’t a teen but a teacher at another high school!

    This was 50 years ago and every time I talk to my aunt’s friend she tells me how grateful she was to my mom.

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  77. Inconsequential Pickle*

    Due to a series of reorgs and role changes (that weren’t entirely initiated by me) at Big Tech Company, I (female) was suddenly in a more prestigious role, and was pretty sure I was being underpaid. I planned on asking for a substantial raise and I asked male coworker with the same job title sitting next to me if he would tell me his salary to benchmark if I was doing the right thing. Yep that confirmed he was being paid $20k more than me, so I asked for that at the next raise cycle.

    My manager not only got me that, he actually got me something like 23k, which was a 25% raise, and was outside of what my manager was even authorized to give so he had to get director approval to make it happen. (Cynical me says they figured it was cheaper than a lawsuit over equal pay, but hey I still got the money)

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  78. The Prettiest Curse*

    I may have told this here before, but we adopted our previous dog from a county shelter in California which was unfortunately a kill shelter because it had very limited budgets and space. The shelter director kept our dog around for several months after he would otherwise have been euthanised, simply because he was a very sweet dog and she really liked him. Eventually, we found him on Petfinder and not only did the director waive the (low) adoption fee, she also found some volunteers to drive our new dog to meet us halfway to our city, because we would otherwise have had to drive 200+ miles to get there. He was the Best Dog in the World, until he died a few years back.

    My current dog is also a rescue and is the reigning title holder of Best Dog in the World. Rescue pets are the best. :)

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  79. MaryMary*

    My husband does this as his default setting. He has shared his salary with female colleagues to make sure they were getting paid appropriately (they weren’t; after he shared this, they were). He tirelessly works the phones to make sure laid off junior employees get a better job. And he recommended against hiring someone who very clearly assumed he was the boss because he was the only male interviewer. He proofs female and BIPOC friends’ email drafts when they want to ask for something big at work (only if they want him to, of course) to suggest how he would ask for it as a straight white well-off man so they can do it that way or split the difference. So not one big fancy story but just a lifetime of trying to give a small boost at work to people who haven’t had his level of privilege.

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