let’s talk about out-of-touch company executives

by Alison Green on January 30, 2025

Earlier this month, we heard from someone whose CEO shared photos of his recent family vacation at a town hall after announcing budget cuts, no bonuses, and increased health insurance costs. And we’ve heard about plenty of other out-of-touch executives before — like the company that quizzed employees on the new boss’s horses, family, and vineyard (yes, really), or the manager who wanted everyone to share their best and worst moments of the pandemic, or the CEO who joined a meeting about layoffs remotely from a golf course.

Please share your own stories of out-of-touch leadership in the comment section!

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{ 647 comments }

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  1. ZinniaOhZinnia*

    The head of the org I work for has been complaining about his home renovations for months. I get it, he had to move out of his house and… (checks notes) into the *other* property he owns.

    This has been happening while several employees are dealing with being illegally ousted from their rentals due to landlords not legally following the lead abatement process. But yes, your kitchen renovation that you chose to do, and temporary move into your own home is also clearly traumatic too.

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    1. Anon for this*

      CEOs talking about their multiple homes always seems like such an easy gaffe to avoid, and yet so many of them step right into it.

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      1. Zyzzx*

        I am in the very fortunate position to own a vacation home, and I’m sooooo cagey about it. I don’t think anyone I work with knows. But I don’t have that E-suite personality!

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        1. Allonge*

          I don’t think that referencing it is an issue, as long as it’s not every other minute, or e.g. part of a complaint on how it’s so hard to maintain. Not directing it at others with a dramatically less money is also a good thing.

          People are usually not upset to hear others have more money than them – everyone knows this is the case! Consideration – as you are clearly doing it – is great though.

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      2. 2 Cents*

        At my previous job, the CMO always managed to schedule the all hands *just* when his house cleaner (at his second home) would be vacuuming. It was hilarious.

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        1. Yes And*

          Is it possible that the house cleaner, for reasons of their own, always managed to schedule vacuuming just when the CMO would be in an online meeting?

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      3. QuiteQuiteContrary*

        I genuinely think a lot of them believe they are “inspiring” the poors to wOrK hArDeR and be like them… as if that’s actually how they got there. Born on 3rd base and all that.

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      4. Ally McBeal*

        I love that one of the reasons that the UAW won their fight against the Big 3 automakers last year is because the chief negotiator for Stellantis took the very first negotiation call from his vacation home in Central America. UAW made gold out of that hay and fired up their members to keep fighting.

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        1. LifebeforeCorona*

          Years ago when the big three automakers were looking for govt handouts, the top executives all arrived in corporate jets. It was duly noted.

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    2. Can't Sit Still*

      My now-retired VP was complaining to me about her home theater renovation, when said theater was larger than my entire apartment. She suddenly realized who she was talking to, and immediately changed the subject. So at least a little self-awareness!

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    3. MPM*

      In 2020, our CEO held town halls from his second home on the coast, taking care to show off his great view, while the rest of us dealt with, well, 2020.

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    4. Sloanicota*

      Ha my boss owns multiple homes (family money, plus I think her husband is rich – she’s not getting that money from our job!) and always forgets that’s not an approachable go-to subject. I can see people pause and blink in confusion whenever it gets brought up. “Your … other, other home. Ah yes.”

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    5. Landed Gentry*

      I have a few bosses.

      One shared they had to sell their plane because physical issues and couldn’t pilot anymore, but they still had their farm.

      The farm doesn’t produce anything, they just have a lot of land…and horses.

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    6. A manager, but not your manager*

      My husband worked at Oracle during a time when company morale was particularly low (mention of suicide in this paragraph): Performance reviews were repeatedly put off for COVID, which meant that most people hadn’t got a standard cost of living raise in years (and worse, people from acquired startups were being paid less than their lower level employees because the pay wouldn’t be adjusted to Oracle levels until their next review). A high ranking former employee sued the company for abuse and psychological harm, then died by suicide, so no one currently felt good about working there. To top it off, it was high COVID at a corporate job that didn’t care about its employees and everyone felt trapped and miserable.

      Enter Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle.

      Everyone in the company gets an email from Larry with a subject line that promises to dispell a rumor.

      He’s heard that people said he might move to Florida, but don’t worry, he’s not moving to Florida (this is not a rumor literally anyone had been talking about). Yes, he did buy an 80 million dollar mansion in Florida, but don’t worry, he just bought it to tear it down (no details on what he’d do with it, and why would there be? Doesn’t everyone buy 80 million dollar mansions just to tear them down?). He wanted to send the email to reassure everyone that he still planned to stay in Hawaii (on the 6th largest island. Which he owns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanai). The rest of the email was about how he was giving back to Hawaii (apparently starting a preschool is enough to make up for keeping most of a colonized island for yourself). This might sound like I’m being snarky, but the email made it sound like he actually thought it was important to clarify this concerning misunderstanding and there was no awareness whatsoever of how it would play.

      Obviously no work was done for the rest of the day as employees 1. asked each other “did you see that?” 2. told all their friends “you’ve got to see this.” I think this was supposed to be internal only, but thankfully everything in big tech leaks immediately, so people could share this: https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/4/12/22380192/larry-ellison-lanai-hawaii-palm-beach-mansion

      I’m not sure how much money the company lost in productivity that day. Oracle made about 39 billion that year, which is about 150 million a day, so if that email came in about halfway through the day, one email cost as much as a mansion in Florida you can tear down.

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      1. CeeDoo*

        Only somewhat related, but at the start of the school year after c-word lockdowns, my principal announced that the pandemic was over and we were all required to attend a big district-wide pep rally thing with thousands of coworkers. The next day (after the pep rally), they announced that he had tested positive for the virus.

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    7. Still Queer, Still Here*

      I was working at a small private college, in a role that called for mid-level experience and/or a masters degree, but had a pay range that capped at just over $50k, and was located in a major city where the low-end average rent for a 1-bedroom was around $1800/month. So basically, not livable. I was married, and my spouse was pregnant when she was covid-furloughed and then laid off, so I was supporting my family on $47k + a $12/hr weekend job, and absolutely drowning. Everyone knew I worked that 2nd job to make ends meet.

      So my boss and coworkers and I are all out to lunch one day, and my boss starts telling us all about the vacation she just returned from: 3 weeks in the French Alps with her husband and young adult daughters. My other coworkers then start chatting about their planned vacations to Paris and Sweden in the next few weeks. When my boss then transitioned to complaining about how she had forgotten to reschedule her custom tub delivery to her home due to the vacation, I’d had enough and quietly made a comment along the lines of “wow, those are some impressive plans, my summer plan mostly just consists of trying to find an affordable apartment!” very light, nothing too pointed. Now to be fair, my boss and coworkers weren’t making bank either–but they happened to all be married to men making mid-6 figures, AND making considerably more than I was because they’d all been there a long time.

      My boss’s response though? “Yeah, we should probably stop talking about this in front of OP. She actually needs this job! I’m sorry, we just forget sometimes! I mean, my salary is about the same as my husband’s end of year bonus!”

      I stayed for 2 years, then found a job in a lower cost area that paid 40% more. Those 3 are still there, and constantly hiring for my old position because they can’t get anyone to stay, for some mysterious reason.

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    8. Rebecca*

      I had a CEO make a very similar tone-deaf statement. When I was a young publishing professional 20 years ago, just as print media was contracting and laying off thousands of people, the CEO held a meeting to address the company’s own imminent layoffs and salary/hiring freeze. In an effort to commiserate with the rank and file, he told of having to pause the renovations on his home in California. Our company was based in New Jersey, and the executive did not work remotely. Maybe he just thought we wouldn’t notice that he had to be talking about his second home?

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    9. LifebeforeCorona*

      I had a boss who had a city home and an island home. His biggest complaint was that the ferry didn’t run often enough for his personal convenience. He hated having to stay over Sunday nights at his second home because there wasn’t a late ferry. Also, the ferry was free and thus you couldn’t reserve a spot.

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  2. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    New Chief exec came from the automobile industry and did a tour going round the nationwide company giving speeches about how we all needed to have a more competitive mindset and ‘need to advertise to best our competitors’ and banged on about how he got to his lofty position by always thinking of the competitive market.

    Slight issue. We’re a largely taxpayer funded monopoly.

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    2. boof*

      Hate to be the debbie downer buuuut I can see that maybe that would play well in the current political environment *sob*

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  3. juliebulie*

    I’m so horrified just by the examples given that I’ll be almost afraid to read all the stories. I often think of myself (not proudly) as a somewhat insensitive person, but there is a level of crassness in these stories that curdles my blood.

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    1. juliebulie*

      I do remember something weird. Back in the 90s, my employer did a massive layoff. I was out of work for just two months (lucky) and once I started my new job, I pretty much forgot about the old one. So when, two years after the layoff, I received an “announcement” in the mail that some high-ranking person who had been laid off had found a new job, I was floored. The person’s name wasn’t familiar, so I probably wasn’t even in his business unit. Why on earth did he think we would care that he found a new job, and how as an ex-employee did he happen to have a database of all the worker bees’ addresses?

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    2. MigraineMonth*

      All this makes me feel a bit better about my insensitive comment this week when I mentioned my embarrassment when my credit card was declined because it had a limit of $X. (Hopefully my coworker just thinks I’m really bad with money and doesn’t realize I was complaining because I thought the limit was too low.)

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  4. Banking On It*

    Not exactly like the examples but my story is about the bank executive that insisted on a split shift for all tellers so he didn’t have to hire more staff. We were required to take 2-3 hour lunches to accommodate the open to close schedule. When we complained, he told us to go shopping for 3 hours and what’s the problem? You’re still being paid for your work!

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    2. ChattyDelle*

      my bank manager tried to do the same thing! I, as the senior teller & the scheduler, told her it was illegal & if she did it, O would be calling corporate HR. she backed down. (that particular manager was so so incompetent in so many ways)

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    3. Caffeine Monkey*

      Not quite as bad but an office coup meant my team ended up with a new manager. Previously, we’d organised the shift rota between ourselves to ensure the desk was covered 7am-7pm, and everyone got one or two days WFH a week. New manager insisted we all had to do a week on each shift, so only one week in three where we could WFH. And even then, we could only WFH for two days that week because, “Nobody gets to work from home for a full week.”

      Yeah, guess who then proceeded to work from home for two weeks?

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    4. LaminarFlow*

      Hold on, I need to pick my jaw up from the floor after reading that.

      WTF barely scratches the surface in this situation.

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    5. Oogie*

      I worked at a regional bank and every branch was required to have a meeting to gather around and watch a video of the CEO informing us no one would be getting raises because the bank *only* profited 20 million last year.

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  5. Bro Really*

    Our CEO always tells us how much more profitable (3x!!!) per employee we are versus our competitors. Readers, all it does is make us complain that we don’t make 3x money.

    He also got mad that people were asking questions about our RTO policy and said “If you live local, and you can’t commit to coming in twice a week, fuck you!”

    He works remotely most of the time.

    I don’t respect him at all.

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    1. Arrietty*

      Wasn’t a chief exec but I had a manager who wouldn’t let me work from home for two hours so that I could accompany my partner to a hospital appointment in the afternoon. Not long after, manager was “working from home” while she moved house. Right, because that’s definitely going to be productive.

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      1. Snarkus Aurelius*

        I had a boss who said if we wanted to work from home, we’d have to take sick leave. What one had to do with the other, I’ll never know, but I’m sure it made sense in her head.

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      2. Sam I Am*

        I worked for an org with a CEO who would not allow remote work (this was pre-covid) because she thought people couldn’t be productive away from the office. But she worked from her vacation home for a full month every year.

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    3. Sloanicota*

      Ha I still remember an old boss telling me his “hack” for working from home (which our org didn’t support at all, for no real reason) – he just used his sick leave! And so could I! To work from home! So I could use PTO and still keep being productive from the comfort of my own home. Why wasn’t I more impressed??

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      1. MigraineMonth*

        My toxic ex-company required a massive amount of travel and overtime from one role. I think the *average* length people lasted in the role was 9 months; at 2 years you were considered a wise veteran.

        To offset the stress of travel and overtime, the company offered comp time. Specifically, on the one week out of four that you weren’t travelling, *if* you had already worked at least 40 hours that week, you were allowed to WFH one day.

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      2. boof*

        lol maybe this is where “unlimited PTO” comes in to play? Like it’s basically just a way to work from home when you want XD

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    4. ferrina*

      My friend’s company was told that if you didn’t like RTO, “just move closer”. The company has offices in LA, New York, Seattle, and London….you know, cities that are not exactly easy to find affordable rent in.

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      1. MK*

        Sure, I’ll move — so long as my salary increases to that cost of living! (I’m in Seattle. It’s expensive.)

        Reminds me of an acquaintance whose work decided to leave San Fran — they offered to let everyone who moved with them keep the SF-based salary, plus a small bonus for actual moving expenses. That let them buy a house in the new place.

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    6. pally*

      Yeah, when I was asked to fill in for a departing manager in anther department, I did my darndest to do a good job. That got me promoted to manage that other department.

      Only thing: I heard later that the CEO was so happy with my promotion as it meant that he’d saved an entire salary. He did not have to hire the two people he expected to manage the department and the additional product lines to be added to that department. I had demonstrated that I could do ALL the work myself. Swell.

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  6. deegee*

    At one company I worked at – where some employees were earning shockingly low amounts – the managing director stumbled in to an all hands meeting explaining our pension plan, drunk after a two hour lunch, wearing sunglasses, and stood up to interrupt the pensions guy to explain that “unless you’ve got at least a million pounds in your pension it’s fucking useless.”

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    1. Hroethvitnir*

      Wow. I don’t have a lot of respect for most of these people, but this one is up there.

      Especially because the way things are going, many people (who’ve worked their whole life!) are genuinely screwed – and lack of ability to buy a house has a huge impact for having somewhere to live *and* having an asset when you need to move into care. Which the peons know, you [redacted].

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  7. the cat's ass*

    Describes my former pinhead boss to a T. Wandered around boasting about his new Tesla after letting us know there would be no bonuses that year. Took his own sweet time transferring funds to the proper accounts after the company dissolved. Don’t miss him one bit!

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    2. Honor Harrington*

      Amazing how bonuses bring out the jerk in people.

      Boss explains to everyone that the team has a pool of bonus money, and anything he doesn’t give to us, he gets to keep for himself. Then invites us outside to see the brand new BMW he bought for himself with cash from his bonus. His direct reports all got half the bonus they had gotten the previous year.

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  8. Targaryen*

    My boss is the head of the DEI council and hasn’t yet met with any of the IT team, admins, facilities etc: aka the highest concentration of women and minorities, and the lowest paid at the company.

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    2. Morris Alanisette*

      Reminds me of the Parks and Rec episode where Chris started a commission on gender equality and every department sent just men to participate.

      “Your gender equality commission is a real sausage fest” – April Ludgate

      Reply ↓
  9. Broccoli the Cat*

    Oh boy I have a good one!

    Our employer has been adamant about telling us things are tight right now, budgets can’t handle extra purchases, etc. Like, constant reminders about how funding is right now. Also plenty of talk about the economy in general being hard and inflation, etc. etc. (A decent percentage of our upper management can definitely be assumed to support the tangerine traitor.)

    In a meeting to discuss a potential project, one of the C-Suite executives brought up that they were looking for a new mattress. Totally fine, right? Nope, they proceeded to name drop the company and exact type of mattress they were looking at. One of my colleagues looked it up and ya’ll, THIS MATTRESS IS $50,000. And it absolutely went right over the C-Suite’s head that maybe now was not the best time to bring up the fact that they can even afford to think about making that purchase.

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    2. Liz the Snackbrarian*

      For $50,000 that mattress needs to be massaging me, singing me to sleep, and loading itself in the moving van if I ever need to move. I got a king sized Tempurpedic this year and that was a big splurge for me

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      2. Lemons*

        It’s a scam. I read somewhere that innerspring mattress quality rises equally with price until you get to ~$3-5k (I forget exactly) and after that you’re just paying for stuff you’ll never even experience since it’ll be under sheets and mattress covers, like fancy fabrics and embroidery.

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        1. Rex Libris*

          Things like $50,000 mattresses exist solely so people with too much money can inflate their sense of self importance by buying $50,000 mattresses.

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          1. Lime green Pacer*

            Sleep-deprived people can be convinced that *this* mattress will solve all their sleep problems, forever. Because how else could they justify the price? (Yes, my sleep-deprived partner had to be steered away from a similar exorbitant purchase, though at a much lower price point.)

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          2. Random Biter*

            “Things like $50,000 mattresses exist solely so people with too much money can inflate their sense of self importance by buying $50,000 mattresses.”

            Wins the internets.

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        2. Elsewhere1010*

          I live near a mattress company that’s been in business since 1899, and they’ve been making their mattresses by hand ever since. They even manufacture their own springs, and their quality is unbelievable. Every mattress is bespoke, and I believe their top price is 10k.

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        3. Afac*

          I think sleep is one of those things that TechBros feel they can ‘hack’. You know, the same way they optimized nutrition with the Juicero.

          If 6 hours of sleep is good, and a comfortable mattress improves the quality of your sleep, then a $50,000 mattress must improve the quality of your sleep by 10x, so you really only need 60 minutes of sleep. Then you can give an interview to a magazine where you boast about how you optimized your life and that’s why you’re so rich and intelligent so everyone should follow your example.

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      3. AnotherOne*

        i’m gonna assume it’s a hastens or something in that line.

        and i only know about it cuz they have a store in Carnegie Hill on 5th avenue. i can do that math- mattress store on 5th avenue means very very very expensive mattress. but i will say they may be the prettiest mattresses i’ve ever seen.

        it is supposed to be an amazing system if you can afford it (and they can get to be the cost of a studio apartment in NYC apartment apparently.) but definitely not for most of us.

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        1. Bronze Betty*

          I just looked up Hastens and, yes, very pretty mattresses! Which I wouldn’t be able to even see once I put sheets on. I’d sooner spend my money on fancy sheets–but wait, I don’t even do that.

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    5. Natalie*

      Is this mattress actually a car?
      Because if I spend $50,000 (!!!) it had better do something absolutely magnificent to justify that amount of money!!

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        1. Walks on Gilded Splinters*

          Now I really hope this exec has a race car bed! It will be custom made, California king size, of course.

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    7. Seal*

      If I’m paying $50,000 for a mattress it’d better come with its own bedroom and en suite bathroom with a separate shower and soaking tub.

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    8. pally*

      I hope the dog has an accident on it.

      There’s no reason to advertise such a purchase. In fact, there’s no reason to MAKE such a purchase.

      Reply ↓
      1. That Paralegal*

        Literally the only reason to make such a purpose is so you can tell everybody about it.

        If a butthead buys something stupidly expensive and the whole world didn’t hear about it, does it really exist??

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  10. Decidedly Me*

    There were layoffs at a company I was working at that affected most teams, including mine. My manager and other upper management created comms, but were waiting for official communication from the CEO before sending them out. Layoffs happened, still nothing from the CEO, who said she’d send it in a few days. A few days pass and suddenly a decision had been made that there would be no CEO comms on the layoffs. However, she did make sure to send out a company-wide email celebrating her 1 year anniversary with the company and how amazing she was….

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    1. CrazyCatWriter*

      There was a round of layoffs in my company October-November. I’m not sure exactly when. The only reasons I know it happened are 1) it was mentioned as an aside in a media article, and 2) someone on my team reached out to me to do recommendations for him on LinkedIn because he’d been laid off. (2 happened before 1.) There has been no official announcement from my team’s leadership that this person is gone. Like, we all know at this point, but there was never a, “This was a tough decision, but…”

      I have no idea who is gone from other teams. No one that I deal with, as far as I can tell.

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      1. ICodeForFood*

        At one point (2007-20012) I worked for a company where the only way we knew layoffs were going on was if someone saw an employee being escorted out to the parking lot with a box of their personal belongings… As if we wouldn’t notice that our coworkers were gone since there was no official communication.

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

          2012-2015 I worked for a company that would only inform the immediate team (the ones who worked every day with the person and would immediately notice). For everyone else, it would be as if the ex employee just disappeared… sometimes you’d find out from the rumor mill, other times you’d just get a bounced email and find out someone has been gone for months.

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          1. Kermit's Bookkeepers*

            This is how it is in my company, most of the time. There’s definitely a culture of sending effusive company-wide goodbye emails on your way out for some areas of the company, but the people in sales seem to leave exclusively by Irish goodbye.

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          3. Anonymask*

            My current company does this! Actually, they don’t even tell you when that person is gone (if you’re on the same team). Their name tag just disappears and their desk stays empty until a new person is hired. It’s WILD.

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          4. One day*

            I’ve worked at companies where I wouldn’t even get a bounced email! I’d send emails and they would disappear and I’d get no response at all. In the end, I’d try contacting someone else in the team – which was really difficult because there were no lists of who was in what team. Finally, I’d find out the person had been laid off or resigned – and no one had informed any of the projects they were involved with, and no one had closed the email account, so emails were still being accepted, but not actually going anywhere!

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      2. Packaged Frozen Lemon Zest*

        I was once out in the field and only found out one of our admins had been laid off when I called her to check in after being out of cell phone range for 6 hours (since she was my designated safety contact). She said “Chad let me go this morning, call him and ask him to look out for you” and hung up on me.

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    2. PinkBanana*

      I worked at a place where the sort of opposite happened. Our CEO just casually mentioned in a standard quarterly company wide meeting that there would be layoffs. Didn’t tell any of the other senior managers this was the case and they were caught completely unaware. The managers all then scrambled to meet with her afterwards to figure out what was going on and if they would be losing staff. And then later meet with us.

      luckily I survived the layoffs as did my department mostly but was a tense 2 weeks while people waited for updates.

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  11. Pottery Yarn*

    My grandboss told all of us we needed to start coming into the office in mid-2021. He’s been working remotely in another state for 20 years.

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    1. H3llifIknow*

      At one of my govt. contractor jobs, we were told when we put in notice “please do not send a goodbye email out” because they wanted to control announcing when/why people left (i.e. control the narrative and spin it). I thought “it’s my last day, what recourse do they have? So I sent an email to about 40 people that either worked for me, or I worked with often/liked/respected. Fuck that nonsense. It was always weird to come in and be like “Where’s Joe? He was here Friday…” and never see him again.

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  12. Union*

    I worked an office job that didn’t pay me enough to live in the vacation town the office was based in. Like I would have had to spend 70+% of my salary to live in the same town, instead of the 50% I was spending to live two towns over.

    The CEO, who normally worked in another office, came in one week because his MULTIPLE vacation homes in town were subject to a new short-term rental ordinance and he needed to file objections in person. He tried to complain to me, the entry-level person working 60+ hours a week and still unable to afford even to rent in town, and I think I actually said “I don’t think I’m the right audience for this conversation.”

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    4. Kermit's Bookkeepers*

      Can confirm that this response works wonders for uncomfortable conversations with all kinds of asshole.

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  13. WeirdChemist*

    I was in grad school during the first wave of Covid lockdowns, working full time in a lab. The professor I worked for kept urging us to “work from a separate office space from your bedroom” to help with focus/etc, talking about how helpful his private office space in his house was. Cool, but we’re all grad students making 20k a year… all of us lived in tiny student apartments with multiple roommates who were also now trying to work from home, so where exactly was this private space separate from our bedrooms supposed to be???

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    1. Spacewoman Spiff*

      Hahaha, I worked for a consulting firm when covid hit and similarly, we got directions from some Partners to find private, professional spaces to work from. The one I remember in particular worked from his home library, and this was highlighted as a good option. (He also started scheduling meetings at 7AM, because why not, everyone was at home.) That it never occurred to anyone that the more junior staff were not working from our dining tables, sofas, bedrooms, out of a strong preference to work from these locations…

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      1. WeirdChemist*

        Ha, my boss tried to schedule zoom meetings during Covid at 8pm, because he “didn’t want to disrupt our work”… I definitely took *those* meetings from bed lol

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    2. Coverage Associate*

      We got a lot of that, too. And while it maybe worked for even junior employees in low cost of living regions, none of us mid career or below had home offices or dining rooms or any surplus room in the Bay Area. Empty nesters did, though.

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  14. BootoBoors*

    Uh oh. I have several examples:

    1) Head of a non-profit that was suffering financially during the 2008 recession. She gathered everyone, potluck of course, and asked us to donate 10% of our salaries back to the non-profit. Then told us about a skiing trip she had planned.

    2) CEO gave a talk to our women’s professional group. So: the audience was his female employees. When asked about women that had helped shape his career, he couldn’t name any and said something along the lines of “all the women i’ve ever worked with got pregnant and stopped working.”

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    1. BootoBoors*

      Oops, one more. My boss was late coming in to work one day and didn’t let us know. Kinda crappy, because she had ripped into my coworker the week before when he had been a few minutes late, and his reason was because his truck’s transmission went out the same morning his boiler had broken. Single-income family and he had 4 kids. But even worse? She was late because her car’s battery had died, and she had insisted on buying a brand new (BMW, natch) car.

      Reply ↓
        2. My Boss is Dumber than Yours*

          During grad school, I worked at an Apple Store in one of the wealthiest parts of Boston. Had a lady come in and say she wanted to purchase the largest MacBook Pro we had, and weight didn’t concern her because she was never going to move it but she wanted a huge screen. We asked her if she were at all interested in an iMac instead, since she could get double the screen space for thousands less. She told us no, because she didn’t want any wires at all on her desk…

          I pointed out that she would still need to charge the battery on her laptop, and she asked how much it would cost to just replace the battery at the store every time it ran out. Yes, she seriously sat there contemplating spending $3000 extra dollars then dropping another $130 every single time her laptop battery ran out rather than have one single power cable on her computer desk.

          Reply ↓
      2. what?*

        I’m sorry – her battery died, which led her to buy a new car? On a whim, or had she been meaning to get a new car?

        Reply ↓
        1. what?*

          I see above since I started drafting my comment the answer is yes, battery died -> new car (which doesn’t answer the second question).

          Reply ↓
          1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

            I’m sure this isn’t the case with this boss, but I did once replace a (15 year old) car when the (hybrid) battery died. The replacement cost was about half-again the book value of the car. The car I replaced it with was definitely not a BMW and it was not done on a whim, though! In fact, I was royally pissed because I thought they were talking about replacing the conventional battery for about a hundred bucks. Nope!

            Reply ↓
          2. BootoBoors*

            This woman was so upset that her car wouldn’t start for the very reasonable reason of a dead battery that she bought an entirely new car. The car was not old and did not have any visible defects. She just “didn’t want the hassle.”

            Reply ↓
            1. MasonryEnby*

              Granted, I’ve never bought a car myself (mine is a hand-me-down from family), but given what I know about both the process of buying a car and the process of replacing a battery (which I have done)…the former is way more hassle than the latter.

              (I realize I’m looking for logic where there is none, but Jesus tapdancing Christ on a cracker.)

              Reply ↓
    2. Not That Kind of Doctor*

      Oh, your #2 reminds me of the guy who gave a talk to my degree program about corporate jobs and how you should always be looking for opportunities to network. His example was a chance encounter with the CEO in the men’s room. We were almost all women.

      Reply ↓
      1. My Boss is Dumber than Yours*

        Seriously hoping one of the Eagles takes a cheap shot at him during the Super Bowl. Would love to see him carted off the field with a career ending injury.

        Reply ↓
    5. allhailtheboi*

      This is more baffling than outrageous: the chief exec of my local government and employer visited my work site to speak to staff about our concerns. When we mentioned anything he would pivot the conversation to the council’s refurb of the local leisure centre and had we been yet and did we like it? It’s not even an expensive leisure centre, so it’s not tone deaf in that sense, but it just such a weird and out-of-touch with our concerns conversation.

      Reply ↓
    6. Under_score*

      My company started a women’s leadership group, led by the VP of HR. Outside of this VP, the entire leadership team is male. There are only two women in the level below that. So, the company clearly needed to make better efforts to promote gender diversity. I was hopeful! This could be good!
      Then, in the first meeting, she gave us gift baskets of drugstore anti-aging face masks and other similar beauty products to “pamper ourselves.” Shockingly, it did not improve from there.

      Reply ↓
      1. BootoBoors*

        Yes, this same women’s working group circulated a “do’s and don’ts” fashion guide, and gave us the advice of “learn golf and to like whiskey”.

        Reply ↓
  15. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

    I had a manager who changed up our in-house style from light background to dark background “effective immediately,” meaning the tech writers had to update hundreds of pages and create thousands of new images ASAP. An hour later the manager posted “Be Glad It’s FRIDAY!” with lots of dancing tree, smiling sun, and margarita emoticons in the company Slack channel.

    Reply ↓
  16. Localflighteast*

    We had our annual presentation from the company that handles our pension scheme. Well intentioned I’m sure. But going on about how you can take up to $60K from your plan for a house deposit when I am sitting next to people who I know can’t even make rent on their own , let alone contribute enough to have $60K available was really painful for me.

    Reply ↓
  17. Susie Occasionally Fun*

    I was laid off from a previous job. After the layoff was announced, I was sent to a meeting with the HR Director to discuss severance, how to access COBRA, etc. Or so I was told. The meeting was actually half an hour of me listening to the head of HR talk about how awful laying people off was, and how much it was messing with his mental health. My layoff was so hard on him, and he wanted me to sympathize with how the whole thing was ruining his week. At the end he had me sign an NDA and sent me out the door with papers explaining how all the layoff stuff would work—papers that he was supposed to go over with me, but we were too busy with his self-pity party.

    Reply ↓
    1. Lab Boss*

      This one really boils my blood- a lot of these stories are from wealthy people who are totally oblivious to people with less than them. Your HR director was fully aware of how bad the situation was and still made it about himself, which is simply unforgivable in my eyes.

      Reply ↓
    2. A Simple Narwhal*

      Ugh I still remember so clearly how when I was laid off years ago, my boss wanted me to comfort her. She spent most of the meeting in tears going on and on about how this wasn’t her call, she didn’t want this, how terrible it was, etc. She followed me down the hall and kept going on and on about how upset she was by this, standing over me wringing her hands and crying as I packed up my desk.

      Everything about this performance screamed “just tell me it’s ok! tell me I’m not a bad person! acknowledge my suffering in this too!”, and as much of a people-pleaser as I was back then, I didn’t for a second consider giving her the satisfaction, I just stared at her and said nothing.

      She wasn’t an exec by any means, but it was definitely out of touch. I’m sure it sucked for her, but I’m fairly certain that it sucked more for me, the one who actually lost their job.

      Reply ↓
    3. anotherfan*

      i wonder if he was related to the doctor who had to confirm my miscarriage. all he talked about was how hard it was for him to deliver such bad news, and he’d had several in the past week!

      Reply ↓
      1. Walk on the Left Side*

        i can’t even imagine this. i am so, so sorry you had to have that experience. i like to think if someone had been like that when they were confirming mine, i would’ve said something to call them out but…trauma in the moment is so weird, who knows how my brain would’ve responded. that’s just such a shitty thing for a doctor to do to a patient. :(

        Reply ↓
    4. Orora*

      Yeah, I’m in HR and that is the first rule of layoffs: Do not discuss your feelings about them with the person being laid off. If you still have a job at the end of the day, your day was better than theirs was. They do not care about your sad fee fees.

      Doing layoffs sucks, no question. It can take a toll on you when you have to be the hammer for an employee that is doing a good job. But save that discussion for your boss, therapist or other HR colleagues.

      Reply ↓
    5. Distracted Librarian*

      Oof. I’ve had to lay people off, and it’s extremely painful – but not nearly as painful as being laid off, which is why I shed my tears in private and cried to my husband about it at the end of the day. With employees, I tried to express genuine sympathy and care but kept myself together.

      Reply ↓
    6. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

      I’ve also had to lay people off, and been very upset about it, but at least I kept my feelings from interfering with delivering the message as quickly and sympathetically as possible. Then the chief engineer (may his memory forever be blessed) took me into his office, shut the door and handed me the Kleenex. I was younger and much more naive then, but even then I knew better than to make the layoff about ME.

      Reply ↓
  18. Less Bread More Taxes*

    This is nothing mindblowing, but during an all-hands two years ago where we were told we were being brought back to the office, our entire executive team – like eight people – all joined the call from their homes. Not a single one was in the office for their big announcement.

    Reply ↓
  19. Chelle*

    Our CEO took time at an all-staff meeting (>10k people) to tell employees to put start times in the subject line of meeting invites, because that’s how he prefers to manage his calendar. Apparently it’s not sufficient that the meeting invite will be over specific blocks on the schedule in the first place? It was just framed as “when you’re scheduling meetings, do X,” too, not “when you’re scheduling meetings *with me*”. It was summarily ignored.

    Reply ↓
    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      I have a lot of Thoughts about poorly executed subject lines and crappy meeting invitations. I didn’t even know this needed to be on the list until today.

      Reply ↓
    2. CheeseHead*

      I had a CEO who would take time at all-staff meetings (~10k people) to talk about whatever was on her mind. It was usually had something to do with the business, but was delivered as a bunch of non-sequiturs. She’d heard some people were stealing food from the cafeteria. Did we know Chinese students did better on standardized math tests than American students? Customers didn’t like the how plain the software looked and wanted more color (off-the-cuff reversing a major company project she’d initiated by complaining about all the color).

      Reply ↓
      1. Distracted Librarian*

        This sounds like a certain politician I know of. Leaders should not be spewing out stream of consciousness to a captive audience.

        Reply ↓
        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          I cannot listen to that certain politician — a friend described his speaking style as “word salad with Nazi dressing.”

          Reply ↓
    3. Hoobert Heever*

      The CEO of our division just had an all-hands meeting, where we had to play trivia about her. Vote on where she was born, how many coffees she drank per day, and which netflix shows she binged. Twenty minutes of that, with thousands of employees. One of the most tone deaf and expensive meetings I’ve ever been too, especially since there was nothing about our business strategy or results.

      Reply ↓
  20. Swiss Army Them*

    This is maybe more bizarre than crass, but still.

    The last company I worked for had a round of massive, out-of-nowhere layoffs. They were handed incredibly badly, announced via email, and it came only weeks after we were told that the company was doing “amazingly.” At the end of a tense Zoom meeting, in which lower-level employees basically interrogated the higher-ups about where the layoffs came from, why we were given no warning, why they chose to do them over email, and what the future of the company looked like, the COO inexplicably decided to call out one of the middle managers and make small talk about her children. She mentioned that her kids were playing outside, and the COO asked if she was worried that her kids would be kidnapped from her yard. The manager blinked and said no, she was in a pretty safe neighborhood, so no, she wasn’t worried. The (older, male) COO then, in what I think was an attempt at a joke, said that she was someone who had to worry about kidnapping because her daughters were so cute. “After all,” he said, chuckling, clearly proud of himself for finding a joke to end this long and miserable meeting with, “no one’s going to try and kidnap an ugly kid!”

    So not only did we learn that our friends were laid off, our jobs may be at risk, our bosses were willing to lay us off over email, AND the whole company was in dire financial straits – we also learned the COO thought our kids were ugly if no one had tried to kidnap them yet.

    Reply ↓
      1. Swiss Army Them*

        yeah, writing it out, he sounds like a serial killer lmao. it didn’t come across that way in the moment, though; he was truly a well-meaning, if bumbling and incompetent, guy lol. he was awkward but not threatening in any way

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  21. Yikes*

    This happened to a friend…their company did layoffs (fairly unexpectedly) the day before the company’s Halloween party. Someone in senior leadership showed up the next day wearing a Halloween-themed shirt that said something to the effect of “I’m a witch.” Maybe not out of touch, but deeply tone-deaf.

    Reply ↓
    3. CrazyCatWriter*

      This happened in my twenties. The company had a half-day on Christmas Eve, with a Christmas party after. Before going into the room for the party, my supervisor pulled me aside to let me know I was being laid off. It wasn’t just me; this happened to about twenty, twenty-five people. The party was downright funereal, as we’re standing around shellshocked and processing this.

      At Christmas dinner the next day with my family, my sister asked me when I went back to work after Christmas. “I don’t,” I said. “I was laid off yesterday.” Cast a funereal pall over Christmas dinner, too.

      Reply ↓
      1. Nack*

        Wow… this one takes the cake for me. That’s the kind of plot you write in an over-the-top unbelievable story about a terrible boss.

        Reply ↓
        1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

          And after the layoff, she stayed in her quaint hometown, where she met the handsome owner of the Christmas tree farm and his adorable but naughty golden retriever …

          Reply ↓
      2. Charlotte Lucas*

        The debate on whether it is worse to lay people off at the beginning or end of the day/week is settled. It’s officially the middle of Christmas Eve before the company party.

        Reply ↓
        2. NoIWontFixYourComputer*

          I got my layoff on the 15th of December. It was still COVID and it was lunchtime, so I got to process it all while I was in my car driving to pick up my lunch.

          Happy happy joy joy.

          Reply ↓
          1. MigraineMonth*

            If I just got laid off, I’m eating well and taking home all the leftovers that I can. I don’t know when I’ll be employed again!

            Reply ↓
  22. Snarkus Aurelius*

    At one of my first jobs out of college, the CEO was notoriously cheap. He certainly didn’t live that lifestyle, but he was a penny pincher everywhere else. Some highlights:

    *We had our own self-administered health plan because it was cheaper. The CEO refused to pay for anything that was preventative. When my coworker got a UTI, the lab work and RX were declined unless she could prove she was septic. Breast exams weren’t covered at an annual OBGYN visit because “women can do that themselves for free.” All the female employees realized that we could go to our local Planned Parenthood for better health care because they had a sliding scale. When we brought up our concerns, the CEO said he had no issue with the health plan because everything he needed was covered.

    *Starting salaries for recent undergraduates couldn’t exceed $30,000/year in 2001. That meant all of us were on very tight budgets. The CEO chronically complained to HR that we weren’t dressed professional enough and we needed personal shoppers because that’s what his wife did. (Filene’s Basement, TJMaxx, and Ross Dress for Less were all we could afford.)

    *The CEO required the receptionist position to have a college degree, despite the role not needing one, and refused to pay more than $27,000/year. When one receptionist presented her case for a $5K raise, he refused to budget. So she got a better job at one of our member companies for $10,000 more. We had to hire receptionists every 1-2 years because of that salary. He didn’t care “because the rate has always been too high since [he] started” in the late 1980s.

    *The CEO regularly lectured the low-paying staff about buying real estate as an investment. He said it was super easy because he got money from his family to do it and it paid off for him. If we buy now, we’ll have a great investment in 20-30 years.

    I still hate that guy today.

    Reply ↓
    3. Lisa B*

      [Breast exams weren’t covered at an annual OBGYN visit because “women can do that themselves for free.”]

      FLAMES. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE.

      Reply ↓
      1. Hannah Lee*

        Oh, the things that poorly managed “self-funded” “self-administered” health plans get up to.

        A couple I know both worked for years at a hospital – Hospital A He got diagnosed with a very scary cancer. Fortunately, not far from them there was an excellent cancer treatment facility – Hospital B with a whole program, extensive expertise on treating that particular cancer. That treatment was only moderately invasive (small incision, but still full excising of the identified tumor, affected lymph nodes), would require him to take about a week off from work had had fees that were not much higher than Hospital A’s. Hospital A had several oncologists, none of whom had particular good reputations … the main ones were on the verge of retirement (and from their reputations, probably should have retired already) and hadn’t updated their treatment protocols in years. The treatment plan Hospital A came up with would require a long torso incision, and had follow up that was using a dated chemo protocol that didn’t have the good result % as the other hospital’s approach. Hospital A’s other clinicians often referred their oncology patients to Hospital B (they were in sister networks that collaborated all the time.)
        But it was a bit cheaper for Hospital A to cover the treatment in-house at their own facility, plus it was revenue for them. So their *super* *special* review board, reviewing cases (with the patient’s name redacted) to approve/deny coverage, denied the treatment at Hospital B, insisting they’d only cover in-house treatment.

        My friends were unhappy, tried to figure out if they could fund the better treatment on their own (and couldn’t afford it) so made plans for the approved treatment since something had to be done quickly. Guy went to his boss to give him a head’s up about needing 6-8 weeks medical leave, his wife also started arranging time off, since she’d be his caregiver. Word got back to the review board, and the CEO called a special meeting of the review board with the couple “We didn’t realize it was YOU when we denied it, of course we’ll cover the treatment with the clinically proven better prognosis.” While the couple were glad the decision was reversed, they were horrified that apparently the supposedly clinically-guided and objective review board valued *some* employee’s lives more than others, was prioritizing bean-counting, and figured having that particular couple be able to keep doing their jobs was worth the incremental cost of the Hospital B treatment.

        Years later, the surgery was successful, guy has been cancer free for 8 years, and both he and his wife no longer work at that hospital with the warped values. But yikes! How many employees of that hospital were stuck with sub-par care and suffered the consequences.

        Reply ↓
        1. Grenelda Thurber*

          I feel really naïve for believing this stuff like this didn’t happen in real life, only in made-for-TV movies. This turns my stomach.

          Reply ↓
  23. Cyndi*

    I used to work in a really hypercontrolling mail processing facility that was obsessed with security theater. (I feel like whenever I answer an “ask the readers” post it’s always about that job.) It was a casual workplace but we were specifically banned from wearing boots above the ankle, anything with a hood, or skirts above the knee. Once I came to work wearing a nice cozy fleece-lined vest with a wide collar and my manager made me take it off because it was…too much like a hood? Or something? I once got sent home to change because she thought my skirt was a couple inches too short. I was thirty years old and this was a non-public-facing job where I sat down all day.

    Anyway, we once all had to stop work for a floor meeting, where a woman several management levels up from us came on the floor and lectured all hundred-odd of us–mostly women, mostly dressed in jeans and sneakers and t-shirts–about how we had to stop “dressing like we were out at the club.”

    Folks, she was wearing a suit with a mid-thigh-length skirt and knee-high boots.

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    1. Seal*

      Early in my career I worked in a beautiful historic university library building that didn’t have air conditioning, like many of the older buildings on campus at the time. During the summer, temperatures inside the building were consistently in the mid to upper 80s but just under what OSHA considered dangerous. Most of the windows could be opened, but those in the big reading rooms with 20-foot ceilings in particular didn’t open far enough to generate a cross breeze. Hugh floor fans ran constantly, which helped, and everyone had a personal fan at their desk. People that worked in the building dressed accordingly; most summer wardrobes included things like shorts (walking shorts were in style then), sundresses, and sandals. Things were more on the casual side of business casual but still work-appropriate and definitely influenced by the lack of air conditioning.

      At one point, there was a sudden interest in updating the libraries’ employee handbook and a committee was formed. A certain and very vocal faction of the committee wanted to add a clause to the dress code that prohibited staff members, including student workers, from wearing shorts to work. It goes without saying that none of them had ever worked in our building in the summer. When others pointed out this was impractical for our building, they doubled down and started making wild accusations about how incompetent the staff in our building was and how disrespectful we were to staff in the other libraries and how unprofessional we looked in “gym clothes”. I believe either the dean of libraries or an associate dean finally had to step in to make them back off. The kicker is after the handbook was updated (with no mention of shorts), a few members of the anti-shorts faction had to attend a meeting in our building during the summer. More than a few people overhead them complaining about how hot it was.

      The building finally got air conditioning after a major remodeling and renovation project. Ironically enough, the people who work there now regularly complain that the air conditioning is too cold.

      Reply ↓
  24. Tall Hobbit*

    This happened to my brother when he was a college student, so I don’t know if it counts, but: during his senior year in college, the school had an informational session about paying off student loans. He had a few friends in attendance with him who had over $100k in student loan debt and were going into fields with fairly low pay. Before the program started, they had a rep from the school’s development office talk about how the school relies on alumni giving and they should start thinking about how they want to give to the school after they graduate.

    It was not received well.

    Reply ↓
    1. Snarkus Aurelius*

      That happened at my college graduation! The university president went on and on about donating, and the booing got louder and louder.

      I worked in the catering service, and I’ll never donate because the alumni association was so awful to the catering staff.

      Reply ↓
      1. Lab Boss*

        Living in a college town and volunteering with students, I’m constantly astonished at how many people who live and work right next to the students forget that undergrads are actual human beings.

        Reply ↓
        1. Strive to Excel*

          I recently discovered that one of the better paid public employees in my state is the state college’s business school dean. And I honestly really can’t be bothered about it because the man is one of the cooler professors I had. Always took time in his schedule to teach the undergraduate classes, especially the basic accounting ones. Never any shenanigans with making students jump through hoops. Extremely supportive of ADA-friendly classrooms – our college probably had some of the least struggle with going remote during COVID because they’d invested ahead of time in electronic systems.

          I still think it’s a silly amount of money to pay anyone out of taxpayer funds. But if anyone’s getting it I’m glad it’s him. I wish more university staff acted that way.

          Reply ↓
      2. RLC*

        Alumni associations really, really need to think about how they communicate with new alumni.
        As a new graduate, I sent a donation (personal check) to alumni association. Representative called me to let me know that “your bank misspelled your name when they printed your checks” and that I needed to fix that. Huh? Checks look fine to me. Representative: “you are an engineering graduate and your checks show a woman’s name so it is obviously wrong”
        Me: “checks are correct and yes I am a woman”
        Representative: “you graduated in engineering, how can you possibly be a woman?”
        I did report the representative to their boss, who happened to be the advisor for a women’s academic group on campus, a group which I was a member of.

        Reply ↓
        1. Overthinking It*

          omg, what year was this?! In fairness to the alumni association, they often hire students, so maybe it was an idiot undergrad who hadn’t had time to learn that he hasn’t experienced the full range of life in his 19 years living in Podunkville (or the insular gated community of Podunk Landing, or whatever.)

          Reply ↓
          1. RLC*

            1984. I noted to their boss (a truly lovely person) that Representative needs to be trained not to argue such things with alumni. She was mortified and assured me that training would occur.

            Reply ↓
          1. RLC*

            Ok, now must share a postscript:
            In 2011, contacted alumni association to change last name from “name at graduation” to “married name”. Now my alumni correspondence is addressed to “Mr and Mrs (Husband Firstname) (Husband Lastname)”
            Husband is not an alumnus of this uni.

            Reply ↓
            1. Grenelda Thurber*

              That’s lovely. So modern and forward-thinking. Now you don’t even have a name. You’re just the “and Mrs” in the middle of your husbands name.

              Reply ↓
            3. Cisco kid*

              Ugh I hate that! I work at a small private university and we very specifically list out everyone’s full name on communications. Mr First Name Last Name and Mrs. First Name Last Name. I am my own person, thank you.

              Reply ↓
      3. WeirdChemist*

        I worked at my school’s on-campus bookstore, and we frequently got request from alumni to get taken off of the mailing list for store catalogs and what not. The problem was that the alumni association would go behind our backs to add back everyone we removed from the mailing list (the catalog had a page soliciting alumni donations), meaning that we kept having to field angry calls from customers about still receiving mail. No matter what we would do or how many times we asked, the alumni association would keep re-adding everyone to the mailing list (and were hella rude every time we talked to them). We eventually just started telling customers to directly contact the alumni association with their complaints. I also refuse to donate because of how rude they were!

        Reply ↓
    2. Rex Libris*

      Sounds typical. I finished grad school around 20 years ago, and to this day the only communication I ever get from the college is an annual postcard that basically says “Happy Birthday! Give us money.”

      Reply ↓
      1. One Million Velociraptors*

        I received fundraising calls from the alumni office days after I graduated, with no job lined up and about $300 to my name. I told the poor person on the other side that I’d consider donating once my actual diploma arrived in the mail, since the school had to give out empty cases at graduation when some sort of delay meant they wouldn’t arrive in time for the ceremony.

        Reply ↓
        1. Coverage Associate*

          I pledged a whole 10% of my expected salary upon graduation from law school. 10% of 0. I still don’t have my diploma because I skipped graduation and never requested it.

          Reply ↓
        2. MigraineMonth*

          My college had a “capstone project” that you can’t get your diploma without. I have a friend (later diagnosed with ADHD) who completed all their coursework but not the giant project, so they’re essentially “all but dissertation” as an undergraduate, and so far as I can tell the college hasn’t taken any steps to help them get their diploma. Since paying for 4 years of private college and then not receiving a degree doesn’t set you up in life, this friend is struggling financially.

          Doesn’t stop the alumni association from asking them for donations so that others can experience the same “advantages of a world class education” they got.

          Reply ↓
          1. Frieda*

            That’s such crap. It might be possible for your friend to still complete the course, or to arrange to transfer in a course from another school – theoretically, the school should be interested in figuring out a plan since it is a low-effort way to increase their overall graduation rates.

            Capstones are a real thing that are often important to the degree, but the school should absolutely have a structure so that students don’t get stuck without a degree because of the one required course.

            Reply ↓
        3. WFHomer Simpson*

          I was once the poor person making these ill-advised calls. Students at my university who received scholarships were required to volunteer for fundraising a certain number of hours each year in order to keep receiving our scholarships. I didn’t have any choice over who I was calling and inevitably got a few recent grads who were still unemployed or working low-paying jobs. So incredibly awkward for everyone. But not as awkward as calling older alumni only to end up talking to the spouse because said alumni was deceased. Or my personal favorite, an older alum who apparently had severe dementia and had wandered away from home a week prior and hadn’t been seen since. My call asking for money was definitely not something the sobbing wife was up for that day. Just awful.

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          1. WFHomer Simpson*

            Forgot to mention that I was in school from 2007-2012, so I was making a lot of these calls in the middle of the great recession. Yeah, definitely a great idea to ask new grads for money in the midst of a terrible economy.

            Reply ↓
            1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

              A couple of my friends made these calls for their work-study requirement and it was miserable. At least one switched to the cafeteria, and our food was gross! I don’t actually donate to the universities I attended because I save my limited donation budget for other causes (and they seem to be doing quite well without me). But I’m always nice to the callers, particularly if they sound really young.

              Reply ↓
    3. Jackie Daytona, Regular Human Bartender*

      Something like this happened at my law school. My class was among those graduating at the height of the recession. Our on campus interview (OCI) season for hundreds of graduating students had a grand total of two employers (the email *enthusiastically* hyping OCI only to later reveal only two employers prompted one classmate to send a reply that just said, “Is this a joke?”)

      The graduating class was staring down mortgage-sized debt to pay off and almost zero employment prospects. Anxiety was HIGH. The fundraising office somehow decided that the same week as financial aid exit counseling (where graduating students learned about the student loan repayment options they had, which was fun when you had no way to make the actual payments) would be a GREAT time to solicit for a “class gift,” meaning the graduating class would make commitments to donate money back to the school. They even planned a festive event for this!

      It was so breathtakingly tone deaf that I have staunchly refused to ever donate to the school.

      Reply ↓
    4. Pikachu*

      My college online bookstore has regular old College University license plate frames for $19.99.

      The College University Alumni version is $49.99.

      :|

      Reply ↓
      1. Ally McBeal*

        Ha! My mother drives around with a cheap plastic license plate frame from my alma mater, which she did not go to, so she can brag about the great university her daughter got into. I found this weird until I met a man who proudly wore the t-shirts and flew the flags of his kids’ alma maters. I guess the difference is that he actually liked his kids, whereas my mother mostly just wants the clout.

        I paid more — hopefully not $50 but it’s entirely possible — for the pewter alumni frame and have no regrets.

        Reply ↓
    5. Nativefloridian*

      I worked for a (private, expensive) college once, they were a couple of times this happened. The one I was there for was suggesting automatic payroll deductions. It was received about as well as you’d expect.

      But one of my coworkers told me about an email she’d received previously saying that it didn’t look good for someone who was both an alumni and an employee to not donate something back to the school. She replied with ‘You can look up how recently I graduated, you know how much tuition costs, and you know how much you pay me.’ before effectively telling them to pound sand.

      Reply ↓
      1. CorruptedbyCoffee*

        I’ll never forget when my bosses boss told me all employees would be donating part of their paycheck to the org through payroll deduction. I worked for a small museum in a major city, making …I think it was $7 an hour, getting 11-20 hours a week. They sent out paperwork to everyone with amounts preselected with how much I would be donating. It sure was nice of the museum director to decide how much her desk clerk would be giving her.

        Reply ↓
    6. Hey Nonny Mouse*

      My undergrad asked my mom for a parent donation during my FIRST SEMESTER. She told them off.

      My grad school had the decency to wait until I graduated before asking for a donation. I told them point blank that I could not afford to donate. (My student job had ended upon graduating, so I was unemployed.)

      Reply ↓
      1. Seal*

        My graduate school did the same to me my first semester. I was tempted to thank them for assuming I’d graduate one day.

        Reply ↓
    7. me*

      Lol I had a conversation with a student who called looking for donations in which I explained that due to budget cuts to the “arts” so they could fund the “sciences” part of the “arts and sciences,” my department was significantly cut right before I graduated and my classes had to be arranged so I could graduate with my degree. The student suggested I donate money for students to study abroad (at other institutions) so they could learn what my school was supposed to teach.

      Reply ↓
    8. JS*

      i work at my alma mater, who is way behind in paying us market rate. I laugh my ass off anytime I get a request for an alumni donation.

      Reply ↓
  25. anon for this*

    Not sure if this quite applies, but I once had a manager finish out an absolutely grueling year by telling us that they had been deliberately over-promising on all our projects (and thus over-working us)……. because if we showed the board how much we could do on such a small budget, then surely they would want to give us more money, since we’ve proved we can deliver!

    In a shocking turn of events, the board in fact assumed that a team that was already exceeding its goals was not in need of a budget increase.

    Reply ↓
    1. Cathie from Canada*

      On a side note, I remember one AudioVisual Dept head who told me he wanted to mess up the AV at a meeting I was organizing because it would demonstrate to the university leadership that his department needed more staff.
      Uh, no…

      Reply ↓
    2. learnedthehardway*

      Ooh – I had a client I was on contract with over-promise results to their client. I had flat out told them that they would NOT get what they were asking me for in the time period they had budgeted, and then they went and specifically told their client (in front of me) that they were guaranteeing the work would be done. Afterwards, they turned to me and said, “Well, now you have to deliver!!”

      They were SHOCKED when they got the bill for my services – it was triple what they had expected, but I pointed out that not only had I warned them that what they were asking was impossible, but that I had pulled it off by working overtime for a month. Pay up or I quit.

      Reply ↓
  26. Not That Kind of Doctor*

    Mine is similar to the OP. My employer was acquired, and within a year there was a round of layoffs that didn’t affect my unit but hit some others in our division pretty hard. The senior executive in charge of the division sent a “this is very hard for all of us” email and attached soothing sunset on the water photos from his vacation pretty much explicitly so we’d have something happier to contemplate. Teams blew UP, and my boss, who takes no crap and minces no words, reportedly told him he’d better never do anything like that again.

    Reply ↓
  27. Nameless*

    The president of the org took us for happy hour and cried, physical tears, that their Christmas gift to their parents that year was beginning to pay back their student loans that their parents had been paying for 20 years because they were finally financially stable enough to pay them back.

    The president earned 250k per our financial reporting. This was at a table of people earning 50-70k a year.

    Reply ↓
    1. Strive to Excel*

      If someone is making 250k a year and has only just become financially stable to pay off their student debt, I’m highly dubious of their ability to stick to anything remotely resembling a budget. Or sensible COL.

      Reply ↓
      1. Ally McBeal*

        Yeah this is one of those situations where you deeply hope that the CEO also founded the company as a startup and that’s why his family was covering his loans, because I don’t know how you pass a background/financial check to become a CEO without everyone learning how much of a financial slacker you are in your personal life. Most people I know started paying their loans while making $35k/year. I’m fortunate that my family was so poor that I qualified for grants instead of loans, so I graduated with only ~$5k in debt, and that still took me 5 years to pay off.

        Reply ↓
    2. Observer*

      The president earned 250k per our financial reporting.

      So a guy earning that kind of money lets his parents pay off his loans for 20 years?! And he thinks that he’s giving his parents a *gift* for finally taking on the responsibility for his own debts?!

      This guy is not just “out of touch”. He’s a full blown self centered narcissist (used in teh colloquial sense.)

      Reply ↓
    4. Maleficent2026*

      SAME. If I hear one more person complain about how Federal employees just sit around and do nothing all day, I’m gonna develop an eye twitch.

      Reply ↓
      1. Mother of Panthers*

        I’m so grateful for the work you all do (former public employee here). I hope you all dig in and practice many acts of malicious compliance.

        Reply ↓
      2. Ally McBeal*

        Or, like, “this plane crashed because… DEI??” instead of “this plane crashed because Congress has refused multiple times to increase ATC’s budget so it isn’t desperately underfunded and understaffed.” ATC leadership must be beside themselves today.

        Reply ↓
    6. My Boss is Dumber than Yours*

      The world will be so much better if a place when your however many times biggest boss kicks the can.

      Reply ↓
  29. Alex*

    The pandemic was ripe for this sort of thing! In 2020 I was working at a place with a VERY unpopular leader, who decided to pass the pandemic by renting a luxurious cabin in the mountains for her family (she had college aged kids who were normally away). Every all staff meeting she would dial in with the giant stone fireplace in the background and talk about how wonderful it was to spend this precious time with her family and luxuriating in nature.

    You can imagine how well this went over with the rest of the staff, many of whom were separated from their family and friends, had sick loved ones, etc. Most of us did NOT have the resources to relocate to a luxury vacation rental!

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

      During the pandemic, the big corp I worked for was headed up by a woman who apparently owned a ranch in Wyoming. Corporate headquarters was based in another state, so I didn’t know- or care- how often she wasn’t in the office. One day, an exec on a conference call breezily said, “It’s lovely that she’s so engaged and only goes to her ranch one week a month!” I don’t know- being gone from your headquarters 25% of the time seemed like a lot to me, but then again, I was living in a ranch house in a different state, with elderly parents, hoping none of us got Covid and died, so maybe my perspective was a bit different.

      Reply ↓
    2. eee4444*

      oh man I had a lot of these during the pandemic. like, height of lockdown, late spring of 2020, a member senior staff asks in a ‘morale building’ (to be fair, optional) meeting ‘what are you guys’s summer vacation plans?’ silence. me: probably just staying in my apartment! *silently thinking: and hoping i don’t die*
      her: oh boring. is nobody traveling?
      the other junior staff: no, just…..staying in our apartments
      her: well MY family *describes to us her travel plans with her family*.

      Reply ↓
    3. My Boss is Dumber than Yours*

      I had a senior coworker who kept trying to “keep positive” during COVID lockdown by reminding everyone that “family isn’t canceled!” Except, my spouse and I lived on the opposite side of the country from everyone else in our family, had put off seeing them the previous year because we were all saving for a once-in-lifetime family trip together that was now cancelled…oh and had a new baby who no one could see or help with. I finally snapped and hit reply-all to her upteenth email and she had the good sense to publicly apologize.

      Reply ↓
  30. Maleficent2026*

    I’m a US federal employee. Soooo, the current US administration. I think that’s all I need to say about that…

    Reply ↓
    1. A Significant Tree*

      And really, all we have to do is wait a minute for the next example of crass, out of touch, wrong-audience-for-this commentary… gonna be a long couple of years.

      Reply ↓
      1. Snark*

        This morning, he sagely informed us all that the helicopter that flew in front of the airliner that crashed last night could have gone up or down or turned to avoid the collision. Glad we have that penetrating analysis months before the NTSB report comes out.

        Reply ↓
        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          Also, DEI apparently caused the crash. DEI and Biden.

          Every time our far-from-fearless “leader” speaks about anything, I think of the older homeless man who would stand outside my old apartment building and give lectures — the one I remember best was about how the atom bomb was actually created by Milton Hershey (the chocolate baron) and there was a top secret bomb lab at Hershey Park. He was a bit strident, but not cruel…and he didn’t have the nuclear codes.

          Reply ↓
  31. AnonFed*

    I mean, I work for the feds. We are being continually lectured about how none of us actually work during telework by someone who spends more time at his golf course and private club than at the office (which is also, ironically at his home) . So that’s fun.

    Reply ↓
    1. Anon So I Don't Get Fired*

      I’m a Virginia state government employee. When Youngkin tried to take telework away from us because he was insistent we were screwing around, his appointees were always, always, always calling into virtual meetings from their homes. They never even tried to blur or change their backgrounds. I’m sure they didn’t care.

      Reply ↓
  32. Ferns*

    During Covid, my country was in extended lockdown. We had an all hands meeting intended to be a check-in on our welfare, where a senior staff member shared their tips on managing working remotely. Their tip was to keep their work items like headset in a little bag, so whichever room in the house they were working from, they could take the bag and be sure they had everything they needed with them. We had junior staff living in shared houses, working standing up over an ironing board because they didn’t have any private space other than their own tiny room, which was too small to even fit a table. Leaving work items in other rooms of our large homes was not something that was a cause for concern for most of us…

    Reply ↓
  33. Sunflower*

    My boss is always saying they’re broke but go away on vacation at least 4 times a year, pay for their children’s needlessly expensive stuff, and brought a dog for over $1k.

    In the meantime, the rest of us are barely able to pay bills on the salary we’re paid. Ok, it is what it is and we’re all free to look for better paying jobs if we’re able, but don’t freaking say we’re all lucky to have jobs in this economy and keep going on and on that you’re broke when you make a six figure salary and brag how much you pay for your children’s activities and buy a $1k dog!

    Reply ↓
    2. Ann O'Nemity*

      My previous CEO was the same way – high salary and always complaining about being broke. Lived in a mansion, drove a Mercedes, multiple international vacations per year, vacation homes, housekeeping and lawn service, etc etc. Yet, she’d conveniently “forget” her wallet when it came time to pay at restaurants and coffee shops. She’d ask to borrow things from employees and never return them (e.g. never going to see that iPhone charging cable again). She’d bum rides off of employees to avoid door dings and parking fees. No shame taking money from employees that made a tenth of her salary! I later found out that she repeatedly took loans from her 401k and made other terrible financial decisions. Totally living outside her means and totally tone deaf about it.

      Reply ↓
  34. Mimi J.B.*

    Brand new chief executive ordered exec team to come to his house for meetings rather than meeting at offices. Real reason that became apparent? His new puppy couldn’t be alone all day. This dog was allowed to openly run around the home and jump up on all of us while we were trying to work and generally misbehave. It was a multi-day set of meetings. No one was warned in advance or asked about allergies or fear of dogs etc. This behavior was foreshadowing of how he ran the organization into the ground.

    Reply ↓
  35. Pleasemadam*

    I just interviewed at a family-owned local crafts-based business. Everything about the job sounded great until we got to the wage: minimum wage to start, and their current highest-paid artisan is making a couple of dollars less than what an actual living wage would be in our area. So if I worked very hard and spent years learning this (very complex) craft I might someday…still be living in poverty while working full time. Meanwhile the owner had talked about his multiple international vacations per year, his new Tesla, his home in one of the city’s priciest areas.

    Reply ↓
  36. Clawfoot*

    In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t truly egregious, but we did get a very stern lecture about the importance of coming into the office and mandatory in-person attendance from an exec who was herself calling in remotely (to the mandatory, in-person meeting) because it was “too cold.”

    Reply ↓
  37. Beth**

    At a time when my public sector employer had already faced 2 years of pay freezes followed by 2 years of pay restraint, a new CEO arrived. In addition to his rather generous salary, he was offered a “housing allowance” that was almost 5 times the mean salary in the company. Because public sector, this was in the public domain. That same year, staff were offered an average salary increase of 2.5% (just below prevailing inflation) to cover cost of living and merit increases.

    Reply ↓
    1. Anon Just for This*

      I’m also in the public sector, working for a regional government. In late 2019, the government decided to pass a law capping wage increases at 1% a year for three years. (Unions ended up taking them to court over it and won). At the same time, various heads of organizations were making super high wages. Including some making well over a million dollars a year. And the politician in charge of the government inherited a family business and is independently wealthy.

      Reply ↓
  38. CrazyCatWriter*

    This unfolded over about three months.

    There was an all-hands meeting. No pay raises due to rising expenses and flat revenue, but the company would revisit in the spring.

    One of my colleagues said, “Well, this sucks, but at least they’ll make good in the spring.”

    I said, “What makes you think that? They won’t revisit in the spring. Something will come up. They just don’t want people bailing in Q4.”

    January rolled around. The CEO sent out an excited email. The company was acquiring another company in a completely different business. (It was a debt leverage buy; the revenue generated was supposed to pay off the acquisition loan.)

    That went over really well. Morale tanked. There was no revisitation of raises in the spring. But hey, it worked to keep people from bailing in Q4.

    This was a CEO who, for Christmas 2008, when the Great Recession was kicking into high gear, had a Christmas card made that was a cut-out hanging mobile of the places around the world he and his family had visited in 2008, with illustrations of cities and airplanes and his family. That went over well, too.

    Reply ↓
  39. Three Flowers*

    Our college president did the big winter vacation photos thing at a retreat recently.

    If I listed the many things the rank and file are doing right now to try to save the institution, without raises, after a bunch of layoffs last year and a massive voluntary exodus of longtime employees, I would probably reveal enough to get fired. A lot of our younger employees struggle to find affordable housing, let alone go on vacation. But hey, optimistic leadership!

    Reply ↓
    1. Grumpy Elder Millennial*

      I will never understand why executives think we want to see their vacation photos. I don’t know these people! For some, it’s got to be a power play, rubbing it in our faces, right?

      Reply ↓
      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        I don’t even want to see the vacation photos from most of my friends or family, unless they went somewhere really, really fascinating. And I love them!

        Reply ↓
      2. Aerin*

        I’m guessing for them it’s like “Oh, isn’t this place cool and interesting? Sharing my experience with everyone will make them feel like they were there!”

        Buddy, if I was really that interested, I can google it.

        Reply ↓
      3. CorruptedbyCoffee*

        I had a director who did this via long emails about her vacations. I think she thought it humanized her. Talking about vacation plans is what colleagues do. She failed to realize it just made her seem more out of touch.

        Reply ↓
  40. Cal*

    I was working at a nonprofit that serves people experiencing poverty. The CEO described herself as “single momming it this month.” She was married. Her husband was a high-earning lawyer and was working on a pretty intense case involving a lot of nights and weekends, so she wasn’t seeing him much. Single moms… do not have a husband bringing in a lot of money to the family. I just blinked at her, resisting the urge to say “I don’t think that means what you think it means.”

    Reply ↓
    2. Overthinking It*

      I don’t think youvshould have resisted that urge! It’s a wonderful sentence in that context, just nuetral and cryptic enough. . .but she can puzzled it out if she trys. Also, if she asks you to explain, well, the answer she gets is on her.

      Reply ↓
    3. Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk*

      I mean…I will say I’m “single parenting” one night or another when my wife is busy, but it’s always in an apologetic way in the context of “Can someone give my kid a ride home from practice so I can do bedtime with his little brother?” I wouldn’t complain about it, and I certainly wouldn’t do it in that context.

      Reply ↓
      1. Ally McBeal*

        Can I suggest substituting “parenting solo” for “single parenting”? Single parents can be (rightfully) really sensitive about married people co-opting the term.

        Reply ↓
    4. Nack*

      Ugh that’s awful. Yes it’s tough to be doing most of the hands-on parenting, but that paycheck really makes a difference!

      I have an acquaintance who once posted on social media about how he was being “Mr. Mom” while his wife went a work conference for a couple days. Definitely gave you a glimpse into that family dynamic! Didn’t realize that feeding and clothing your children was solely on mom’s shoulders…

      Reply ↓
    5. Spreadsheet Hero*

      Oh, man, that’s when you weaponize (or invent) your tragic backstory. “Oh, gosh, I just so respect single moms! You know, my mother had to raise me pretty much by herself after my dad tried to bankrupt her with a custody battle and moved to (faraway city) so he wouldn’t have to pay child support. ” Big smile. “It’s so tough having to raise a kid all on your own while working and trying to make your ex see reason all the time, don’t you think!” Unblinking stare.

      Reply ↓
    6. Jean (just Jean)*

      On occasions like this I fantasize about weaponizing my widowhood…by speaking out loud, not just by thinking my own thoughts. Example:
      “Me too! I’ve been single momming since my LH died in [month, year].”

      It’s not as bad as it sounds–I’m mothering one young adult with a driver’s license, not a group of rowdy little kids who require my attention for 95% of their waking hours–but my private snark is strangely satisfying.

      Reply ↓
      1. Jean (just Jean)*

        P.S. Without going into enough detail to out myself, I can add that I have supportive family and friends, local and long-distance; a modest but steady income; and a kind-hearted, supportive Significant Other. Life could be much, much more difficult.

        Reply ↓
  41. Anna Mouse*

    I work at a university. We’ve been dealing with budget cuts for professional staff for months and hearing dire warnings about the budget deficit.

    The university president sent out a long email about how great the capital campaign is going and how they’re going to be able to invest millions of dollars in athletics facilities and buying more real estate (on which they will not pay property taxes).

    It didn’t go over well.

    Reply ↓
    1. office staffer*

      Oh yes, the importance of athletics in higher ed. I worked in higher education in a unit that offered continuing education courses for business professionals. We even ran a small hotel and conference venue on campus where people would stay when taking our professional development workshops. The hotel was also used by the school’s football team during the season. The team would stay there the night before every home game. One morning we arrived to work only to be called into a mandatory all-staff meeting. There we were told that the university had to make some budget cuts and had made the difficult decision to eliminate our unit and close the hotel. All of us were losing our jobs through a reduction in force. Over the next day or two several (but not all) of us would be offered our old jobs or similar jobs as part of a new smaller unit. Anyone who worked for the hotel was out of a job because they were closing the hotel. Then they said, “But don’t worry, we’ve already notified the football team and they are ok with the change.” The way they said it implied that of course, the football team would be of higher concern to each of us than our own livelihood.

      Reply ↓
    2. S*

      Haha, is this an Ivy League institution based in Rhode Island by any chance? If so, that email was hilarious. I can’t wait for the professional staff to unionize.

      Reply ↓
  42. techie*

    This was now more than ten years ago, but it is still a catchphrase employees at my large tech company use to represent out-of-touch execs: the former CEO once told us that he uses a certain smart home product “at my various houses” to save money.

    Rank-and-file employees still love to joke about how policies we have to follow might be different if we had “various houses.”

    Reply ↓
  43. Colin Software*

    At a major investment bank, we had a mandatory attendance for the head of IT’s retirement meeting. An auditorium filled with 100 lower-level peons who couldn’t care less, a dozen weeping execs, and the guest of honor.

    My two “favorite” parts of his retirement speech were him saying, “I hope you have all been financially rewarded as well as I have”, and “I’m hoping to spend more time with my family — I’ll be road-tripping with my daughter this Spring to choose a boarding school.”

    Reply ↓
  44. Retail dalliance*

    I work at a private school. Three years ago, health insurance went up 300% between December 2021 and January 2022. My payment jumped from $100/mo to $300/mo and our administrators were absolutely fine springing that on us about two weeks before it happened. That sets the stage for what came next:

    The school came upon hard financial times during COVID. They froze our salaries, raised the percentage of healthcare costs that employees pay, and decided to do a reduction in force in March 2022. They hosted a “professional development day” where we were invited to give input about which departments should be downsized!

    It does not get more “hunger games” than that–many people felt that the arts department should be downsized (not my department, but my heart went out to them) and art/music teachers had to watch their coworkers do a GALLERY WALK, at the behest of the principal and president, putting ideas on posters about how to save the school money. It was a “brainstorming session” about who should be laid off! The arts department still enormously dislikes many of the rest of us, and I don’t blame them.

    Reply ↓
  45. Dust Bunny*

    Minor one (I haven’t worked anywhere that had literal executives): I had to pull over and call in late on the way to work one day because I was driving in a literal blinding rain storm and came very close, several times, to either mis-steering or being washed off the road into the ditch. Not exaggerating–I could feel the car sliding sideways.

    I was not reprimanded but at the next staff meeting one of the upper-level professionals made a point of telling us that we needed to do better about planning ahead for travel in bad weather. This was clearly about me being late one time (I was religiously on-time. I also lived the furthest away from work and always left a lot of buffer time to get there).

    The kicker? She had traded shifts that day with a professional who lived closer because she didn’t want to drive in the rain.

    Reply ↓
    1. Hannah Lee*

      At a very large company I worked at years ago, I struggled to get to work in a literal blizzard.
      It took me hours in my little car, but I didn’t feel like I could afford to miss work. Things were so bad the workers at the Mass Turnpike toll booths I went through on the way in all told me to get off the roads. “honey, you should NOT be out here in this … did you see the roads? The only people out should be the plow”

      Many many people did not make it in, there were accidents and spin outs and people stranded in snow banks for hours.

      The next day, the CEO sent a company-wide email with the title “Yes it snows in New England …” paragraph after long paragraph chastising the entire company for the poor attendance due to the blizzard, with rants and personal insults and attacks on people’s character for not prioritizing duty to the company over their personal safety and the needs of their families … for. one. day.

      This was the same CEO who was prone to also company wide email to badger employees into voting Republican and donating to his preferred political candidates (with implied threats about how he would know who didn’t and what he would do to those employees) as well as badgering everyone about signing up for hefty United Way contributions. Like, buddy, you’re a gazillionaire with your own plane, multiple homes and half your family working here being paid very very well – fund your own stupid causes! And stop badgering the lowly peons at “your” publicly traded company.

      Reply ↓
  46. Anon for This*

    Our company announced that we were going to start offering paternity leave (a small amount, but still better than nothing), and our CEO was weirdly combative about it. He then, on a call with the entire company, announced that he was going put his wife “back into production” so he could take paternity leave. Yikes.

    Reply ↓
    3. Observer*

      announced that he was going put his wife “back into production” so he could take paternity leave

      How on earth does someone with such a total lack of understanding of people get to that position!?

      I’m no longer shocked that people who have no moral compass are successful. But being this out of touch is a whole different level.

      PS I wonder what his family was like.

      Reply ↓
        1. Jean (just Jean)*

          Absolutely! Plus, people this crude and clueless are a walking, talking advertisement for vasectomies. He’s given the world enough genetic material already, thankyouverymuch.

          Reply ↓
  47. Upside down Question Mark*

    My husband and I were living with my grandma to afford rent as newlyweds and this was widely known in our small company and small town and nothing I felt particularly ashamed about as everyone loved her too and it was an expensive tourist-flooded area in the Rockies. The new CEO had the company pay for him to have a 4,000 square foot luxury cabin in the San Juan mountains in CO (if you know, you know) for the FRIDAYS he flew in first class from Seattle by himself. During a team building mountaineering outing with him, he and his wife, who was visiting, made a big show in front of everyone of “compassion” towards me after acting shocked at learning I lived with my grandma and saying “Yeah, times are really tough for all of us. Keep your chin up.”. I got a kiss from karma that day when my husband (an ex-German military mountain corps) beat that CEO up that 14,000+ ft mountain peak and back down in front of everyone and one year later (after being laid off) learning the CEO had taken our 150 person company down to 7 people, sending a local building custodian out to work the construction project we were managing with no certs at all on top of it. They had to sell the building and I wonder where he slept on Fridays…

    Reply ↓
  48. that hertz*

    The company that I used to work for had a milestone anniversary that fell during peak lockdown, at a point when we were absolutely drowning in work and struggling to adjust to WFH. The company’s founder/owner decided to celebrate this anniversary by setting up a compulsory all-staff Zoom call that I believe lasted at least an hour, in which he related the entire history of the company, how he founded it and how its success had made him personally a multi-millionaire. This was honestly not unusual at that company but the finishing touch was that throughout the entire call, which he was taking from his second home in Monaco, he was smoking a large, cartoonish cigar.

    Reply ↓
  49. AnonFed*

    Oh, I remembered another one. I work for an agency that has a culture of “move out to move up.” Basically an expectation that to be in leadership, you need to work in multiple regions to get well rounded experience.

    When I first started about 20 years ago, I went to a new employee orientation, and the topic of how to manage that culture in dual career households came up. The group of about 200 people was probably 60% women.

    One of the panelist, a man in his 60s, seemed befuddled by the conversation, and said he was successful because he found a supportive wife, and questioned whether leadership was right for those of us didn’t have supportive wives, because life is about choices.

    Reply ↓
    1. pally*

      I think, as a woman, I would have asked that panel where I might go to find one of these supportive wives. Maybe order one up from the Sears catalog maybe?

      I’m sure that panel would know exactly where to look.

      Reply ↓
    2. learnedthehardway*

      I have more than once mentioned ironically to friends that I (female, married, straight) could do with a supportive wife. This typically comes up when I am asked by my spouse to do the supportive wife things (in addition to running my business, etc. etc.) that he doesn’t like doing – like making dentist appointments, etc.

      Reply ↓
      1. Spreadsheet Hero*

        “Gotta get me a wife” has absolutely been a catchphrase in my friend group for that exact feeling (though not usually because of men, since my friend group is as queer as I am).

        Reply ↓
  50. Monkey bread*

    The last company I worked at had completely clueless and horrible executive leadership.

    Last year a new CEO came in, who then proceeded to replace the CTO, CHRO, CPO, CMO etc., all his cronies. They started a “We are family” kinda of bimonthly newsletter where each time a company employee will be featured, with insight into them as a person. You all….. the featured person in every newsletter was either a C-suite or someone high up the chain. The company did a ton of silent layoffs last year, with no raises, budget cuts, mandatory RTO and hiring freezes. But we diligently got to read about the amazing lives of these execs, photos of their families in front of their properties, their amazing vacations, their children getting admitted to private colleges.

    Oh, also the CTO lived in a different city than HQ and didn’t like traveling often. So they opened a whole new office in Utah…..and demanded employees from other states to relocate there. With the company paying 40% of the moving expenses!

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  51. Josame*

    At a quarterly meeting, attended by the entire company, which happened to fall on February 29th, the CEO first announced gleefully that he was getting an extra day’s work out of us without having to pay extra. Then he said that some countries had a tradition on Leap Year day that unmarried women could propose to men. He then turned to the only woman on the executive staff, who was single, and said, “(woman’s name), quick! Get right on that!”

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  52. Nina from Corporate Accounts Payable.*

    I’ve shared this story on here before, including the recent post about the executive sharing family vacations. The owners of the small company at my first job out of college were very into conspicuous consumption. I had a long commute and a car that broke down frequently. I was late one day because of car problems and one of the owners asked me and I told him the reason. He said “you need to get a new car” and I said “I can’t afford one”. Another owner chimed in “you need to get a new car” and again I said “I can’t afford one”. I then said I live with my parents and I don’t spend much on other things, but somehow I still couldn’t afford a new car. One of the clown owners said “I know, you have a crack addiction!” I just mumbled “yeah, that’s it”. I was paid a pittance at that job and they knew it. Meanwhile they were driving Porsches and owned small private planes. Years later I found out the small plane thing didn’t end well for one of those guys…

    One of my colleagues heard the entire conversation and he was disgusted on my behalf. He was also underpaid – it was a recession and they took advantage. I only stayed there for 9 months – I just needed that first job experience and moved on as did the colleague who overheard the discussion. Within six months at my new job, I could afford a new car!

    Those owners were awful and sadistic in other ways. They enjoyed making the office admin cry and played mean pranks on her until she found another job and left. That’s another story for another time.

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  53. Working under my down comforter*

    At my first job, the publisher/owner was on the board of a major cultural institution that held an annual fundraiser dinner every summer. Upon getting ready for this dinner, he would make us go to the location to help set up tables, chairs and decor during our workday. Some who pushed for exemption got it while others were expected to go. Usually the department heads went to make peace on both sides. Nothing was offered as a thank you; no provide lunch either. We all had to go back to work after. Over time, people started pushing back or making themselves unavailable. Finally, after many years, this favor stopped.

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  55. Judge Judy and Executioner*

    In the buffet line at a company event, the new Chief Legal Counsel (reported to the CEO) was talking about moving to our area. She shared how nice she found the corporate apartment, which no one else knew existed. Her audience was low-level managers and individual contributors making less than a third of what she did, yet she kept going on about it. It must be nice to get free housing with a job, especially when her annual salary was higher than the average home price in our area.

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  56. Mainly Lurking (UK)*

    Not a CEO, but a Head of Department, does that count?

    In early March 2020, having been in between jobs for some time, I started a new fixed term contract in an NHS project team which had been short-staffed for months, and had in fact been waiting to appoint for the role since November. On 19th March I was told that as all the health programmes were on hold, the programme management office staff would be deployed to other teams and there was no need for me to be there. My last day was Friday 20th March.

    It didn’t help when a Head of Department (who was linked the programme team, and almost certainly knew I was being let go before I did), felt compelled to tell me at length how she and her husband were going to save So! Much! Money! because of the Coronavirus! Cancelling the Sky Sports channel because there are no sporting events! Not going away on holiday! Reduced mortgage payments due to the cut in interest rates! Not going to restaurants! Not going to the cinema! I don’t think she was a bad person, probably she felt a bit awkward (we were living in unprecedented times after all) and didn’t realise I really wasn’t the right audience for this message.

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  57. Red*

    I’ve got two:

    Worked at a company once where every year the owners would throw a party right before Christmas. To be fair it was nice. It was a 2 hour catered lunch in outside tents and they honored all the employees who hit milestones. However, where they were a bit out of touch was with their gifts for the milestones. Mostly it was branded stuff, but I remember one year for the person who had been with the company 20 years the owners praised the employee and then started talking about how they, the owners, always go on vacation to beautiful locations and how they wished they could share that with everyone. At this point my friend is convinced this lucky employee is about to get tickets for a trip or a cruise or similar. But nope! What the employee got for their 20 year anniversary with the company was a framed photo collage of the owner’s vacation complete with the owners in shot.

    Additionally, at another company I worked at, the boss’ wife was our VP and HR. She loved to brag about how she had a degree in engineering and a master’s in chemistry. She also liked to brag about how she passed her hardest classes because her professors either a) always passed the women because then the women couldn’t complain of discrimination or b) the professors thought she was hot and so would just give her an A.
    (For the record, I never saw her degrees, but I did see a photo of her younger and I don’t think anything she ever said was true lmao.)

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  58. NonnieMuss*

    My employer owns and operates daycare for its employees. In December 2020, when said daycare was taking the children of essential employees (not most of us) only, when public schools were closed, and the daycares that hadn’t gone out of business were at limited capacity, we got an email ordering us all back to the office because we’d had enough time to figure things out. The top brass all had at least one of (1) money (2) stay at home spouses (3) adult children.

    People were furious and the top brass threatened to have middle management take attendance. People were furiouser and top management beat a hasty “we didn’t realize” non-apology retreat from their announcement.

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  59. ceebie*

    Early in the pandemic our CEO (small company) insisted on individually calling everyone who’d been furloughed.

    Not sure why as the leave had already started and all the important admin parts had been handled already on a team level. I think in his head he thought we would feel valued and encouraged, but in reality it just made for an awkward small-talky conversation, especially as I was quite new and he didn’t really know me and now my job was insecure.

    Part way through I mentioned I’d been trying to grow a handful of plants in pots on the window of my rented flat, a tower block in a town centre, since I was spending so much time there now. He responded with an anecdote about how much he was also enjoying being able to spend time in his large flowering garden… and lawn… in an especially nice part of the countryside… plants are great right?

    Hmm. I left that conversation more disheartened about the situation than I was before, that’s for sure!

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  60. anon for this*

    Public library with a large sign outside the front door proclaiming exalted sentiments about respecting the rights & dignity of all, etc etc that employees pass all day long in jobs where admin refuses to support employees who are bullied by supervisors and assaulted/hate crimed by ‘patrons’.

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  61. VoPo*

    I once worked as a Director at a small company that was sold. After I’d been working with the new CEO a while, I met with him to talk about my role and compensation. I hadn’t had a raise in 2 years even though the company was doing really well (I should know as I managed our revenue reports and P&Ls). He said that the company wasn’t looking at compensation at this point but I should check in with him next quarter. I did and got the same answer.

    Around the time of the second conversation, he hired a new marketing employee (who would report to me) without consulting me or letting me interview her. She was awesome fortunately, and none of this was her fault. One of my many hats was HR/payroll, so I had to ask him for her offer letter so I could input her salary. Y’all, he hired her at $30k MORE than my salary. She was straight out of a master’s program with minimal professional experience. At the same time, he also promoted a young man we’d hired less than 6 months previously with a significant salary increase to go with it. And to add even more, he also had an increase in his own salary that I got to input in the payroll system.

    Well, I met with him and asked again to review my compensation and brought proof of my value to the company. I also mentioned that he clearly was reviewing compensation considering recent hiring and promotions. He told me “if you can’t handle seeing someone else promoted, you shouldn’t be in charge of payroll”.

    I quit two weeks later (I’d been job hunting for months – the writing on the wall was clear). When I told him salary was a big reason I was leaving, he was shocked.

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  62. Olive*

    During his first all staff meeting, the COO said he had taken the last two years off before this job and that he highly recommended we all do it.

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  63. Slinky*

    I’ve shared this one before, but it’s been a while. My husband used to work for a private company, a family business that the owner inherited from his father, who inherited from his (who was also the founder). This business aggressively underpaid employees and provided no support.

    The owner, however, had all that inherited wealth. He’d take his family on lavish trips, rumored to cost $1 million (I suspect this is an exaggeration, but think private planes, chalets, gourmet dinners, the works). Every Christmas, he’d send employees a photo card of his family on their expensive trip.

    You can imagine how well received that was.

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  64. jane2*

    One of the partners for an agency I worked for more than a decade ago was widely recognized as A Problem in more ways than I have the spirit to get into. She went through half a dozen assistants in a few years and was given largely unchecked power over a slew of unpaid interns, many of whom were getting college credit for their internship and were thus actually paying to be there rather than being paid for it. Their duties were supposed to be specifically related to learning about the agency’s work and getting direct experience with it- not functioning as mini-assistants.

    Anyway, one time she sent her unpaid intern to wait in line at the Apple store to repair her iphone.

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  65. Successful Birthday Rememberer*

    President of the company loves to tell us that if we are not dedicated and passionate about the company and disrupting the industry yada yada, then we shouldn’t be working here.
    Barely anyone in this fortune-200 company got any raises the year he was especially passionate about it (practically scolding people in a company-wide meeting). This man comes from old money but also makes 7 figures a year.
    But sure, you’re here because you are dedicated and passionate. I am sure I can explain to the grocery store and utility companies that they need take my corporate passion and dedication instead of money.

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  66. MardiGras*

    I worked for a large electric utility in Louisiana. Based in NOLA. In 2005. Many, many of my coworkers lost homes and family members. We were spread throughout Texas, Arkansas and Missouri to keep working.

    Leadership sent out a “care package” with thanks for the mandatory 12 hour days we were working. With a copy of “The Wizard of Oz” on dvd. Because “there’s no place like home” and “we know you are all missing home, and we want you back as soon as possible”. People were OUTRAGED, and extremely hurt. It was gross.

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    1. Overthinking It*

      Removed, along with a lot of other comments from you in this thread telling people their stories aren’t egregious enough. Please stop that. – Alison

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  68. E*

    In mid 2020 the CEO laid off 10% of the office staff and cut all salaried employees pay by 3% because covid. A month later bought himself a new porsche and his son (who was a manager) a new $80k truck as company cars. This was an essential industry where our revenues were higher in 2020 than 2019. I left but a friend who stayed didn’t get that 3% back until 2022!

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  69. Ghost Emoji*

    Right before Thanksgiving in 2020 (aka in the middle of the pandemic) the CEO of our small company called my whole department into a meeting. She told us that a regulatory agency had scheduled an audit for the week after Thanksgiving, and asked all of us to “strongly consider” not seeing our families for Thanksgiving so we wouldn’t get COVID and be out sick during the audit.

    Then she left for her Thanksgiving vacation in Vegas with two other employees.

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  70. mango chiffon*

    The time for admin professionals day where the leadership invited all of the admin staff for a “celebration lunch” in which they forgot plates, so one of the EAs had to find plates for our own lunch. And all the people in the room were the people most senior in the org, the EAs who reported directly to and supported the senior leaders, and admin coordinators who are among the most junior in the org. Our president was talking about his summer plans to go to Italy, and then the chief of staff decided it would be great if she asked each of us admin support staff to talk about our summer travel. Needless to say, none of us had any plans because it’s hard to take extended time off and we don’t have the money to travel to Europe. I was also wearing a mask and not eating lunch because I didn’t want to risk my health, and was asked about why I wasn’t eating. Super awkward. Eventually the leadership started talking amongst themselves about work related things during the celebratory admin lunch and the admins all just sat there in silence. And since I wasn’t eating lunch in the room, I was literally twiddling my thumbs waiting to get out of there. The following year, we admins just asked if we could go to a restaurant on our own for admin professionals day and they let us do that thankfully.

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  71. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

    our nonprofit is directly impacted by the Title IX changes, the threatened financial aid stop, the people we serve are already getting targeted by bigots more than they were a month ago… and executives held a big meeting to grin at us about a new logo they designed. which is the old logo CUT IN HALF, like that couldn’t possibly be misinterpreted.
    c-suite people keep fishing for compliments, “how do you like the logo?” and we all could not possibly give less of a crap.

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  72. bamcheeks*

    This is not especially egregious as these things go, but I’m still pissed off about an email about redundancies, red-circling, consultation period etc which was sent by our organisational leadership in about 2012. It finished with a fair stock-phrase, “We want to reassure everyone that, whilst difficult in the short-term, this re-structuring will leave Organisation in a better shape for future challenges blah blah blah”.

    So, I may be being made redundant, some of my friends will definitely be made redundant, we’re all going to go through the hassle and stress of re-applying for our jobs, but it’s all good news because Organisation will be all right in the long run! Such a weird, weird perspective on what people’s priorities are.

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  73. Tall Hobbit*

    A colleague and I once met with a Board member to express concerns about salaries. Everyone on staff was grossly underpaid to some degree and both my colleague and I were at least $10k under market value for entry level (we were both long term employees). At the start of the meeting, the Board member talked about how the sale of his house was kind of disappointing—only $125k profit for a house he’d owned for 15 years.

    Strangely, my proposal to evaluate increasing taxes by $50 to fix our salary problem was just too unreasonable.

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  74. HomerJaySimpson*

    When the USS George Washington had a minor epidemic of suicides among her sailors, the Chief of Naval Operations (Basically the dude right under Secretary of the Navy) showed up to ship and held an all hands meeting wherein he shared such gems as: “Lower your standards, at least you’re not in a foxhole getting shot at” and other words that boiled down to ‘stop crying and suck it up, have you tried not being depressed?’
    It didn’t go well. People started sharing fake recruiting posters with the CNO’s picture and the slogan ‘US Navy- Lower Your Standards’

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    1. Secret Squirrel*

      According to the article linked from Wikipedia’s page on the ship, that was actual the Master Chief Petty Officer, not the CNO.

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    2. Anon for This One*

      I have a loved one who served on the Washington. I have VERY STRONG OPINIONS about what command can do with themselves, and none of them are polite. “Have you tried not being depressed?” is basically their response to anything that sounds like, “my mental health could be in the toilet, and actually i’m having suicidal thoughts, I could use help.”

      Strong opinions.

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  75. CEO of Llama Drama*

    In the middle of some layoffs that were impacting a certain part of the business, our CEO told that team about the wonderful Disneyland trip he had, encouraging everyone to take one as soon as possible and really immerse themselves in the magic.

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  76. Sigh*

    Yesterday, our CEO said it hurt his feelings and he felt attacked by feedback provided — at leadership’s request — on an open but anon forum after they absolutely bungled the response to the current funding and comms freeze impacting our org. After they hemmed and hawed on even telling us if we could meet payroll and lectured us about reacting vs responding.

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    1. NVC*

      There’s a book about Nonviolent Communication that explains why “attacked” is not a feeling (I think it’s a judgment). I like its lists of emotion vocabulary – when our needs are, and are not, being met.

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  77. SnookidyBoo*

    I don’t know if this if counts but:

    I worked for a few years in the public art department at my city. My boss was an older woman who had been in the position for decades. In my three years working for her she:

    – hid important documents from me even when I told her how much of a difference having those documents would make and I really, REALLY needed them (I found them in her office drawer after she retired)

    – was completely hands off in her role as manager to the point where she foisted an angry client off to me over text and that angry client escalated to the point to where security/police had to be called to trespass her from the building

    – told long weird inappropriate stories about sketchy things she had done on the art council to get certain pieces of artwork

    – once dragged me off the job to hang posters in her office

    and finally once came to an art reception completely blasted with one of her male art buddies (who owned a major gallery in the community) and both of them proceeded to sexually harass me the entire night.

    The kicker is a few years after I had quit I was watching my local PBS channel and she was on an advertisement advocating for local art in the community. The commercial portrayed her as this wise and benevolent grandma, talking about her grandson and the importance of leaving behind a legacy for future generations. It was all I could do to not throw something at the television.

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  78. Bookish*

    Payroll messed up my first paycheck at my brand new job. It was terribly stressful- I had just graduated grad school, had a mountain of student debt, and was living off a credit card full of charges from a cross-country move. I was single in a strange city. Payroll worked it out but when I told my boss, trying not to cry, she said, “Oh, I wonder if they’ve messed up my paycheck. We live off my husband’s salary and my paycheck gets deposited into a trust fund for my son, so I never look at it.” Decades later, I am still gobsmacked at that response.

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    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      I once had a trainee whose first paycheck was missing (back then, direct deposit took more time to set up, so everyone’s first check was paper). Once we did all the legwork to make sure it wasn’t misdirected, we confirmed with Payroll that it hadn’t been issued. Payroll asked if they could just “wait,” because they didn’t want cut a check manually, then to go to the COO and admit their mistake. (It would require his actual signature.)

      Luckily, my manager and department were beloved by our VP (who was great), and once the situation was explained, he made sure that the check was issued by the end of the day.

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  79. gratone*

    Some context: I’m the chump who hasn’t had a raise in 11 years who wrote in with a different question a couple of months ago.

    My boss recently told a coworker that she might as well embark on some home renovation projects, because “the money’s just sitting in my account.”

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  80. Gunther Centralperk*

    We were volunteering at a community center that served meals to low-income youths. Our exec customized matching t-shirts branded with our very recognizable financial organization name because “it’ll be a great opportunity to show that we care!” We tried pushing back, but she insisted that the t-shirts were essential for team building.

    I was giving someone a sandwich and they said, “So this is like a fun field trip for you guys? You work in an office and then come here once to make yourselves feel good?” It was awful, I didn’t know what to say back because it was true and so tone-deaf.

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  81. I don't work in this van*

    When Teslas were still fairly new on the market/had year-long waiting lists/all cost over $100k, my boss would *regularly* and in huge meetings say things like “you know how on the Tesla screen…” or other references that required either owning or having some pretty in-depth familiarity with Teslas. This was at a company in a high COL area where entry-level jobs started below 40k and the HR director laughed because people kept asking for raises and she found that somehow impertinent. So out of touch.

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  82. European Worker*

    I work outside of the US, with very different bank cards (credit cards like in the US don’t exist). However like an American credit card, for a fee, you can get a gold or platinum debit card that give you different advantages. My boss asked me to put all my airline tickets (thousands of euros) on my personal bank card and be reimbursed, rather than continue to use the company account on file with the travel agent we used. When I asked why, he told me that my bank card would give me travel insurance. I told him that I didn’t have a gold or platinum level card (which costs a lot of money every month), just the basic free debit card. He was really puzzled, since he didn’t know lower level cards existed. I also had to tell him that I never had enough cash in my account to cover multiple international plane tickets, and could we please stick to the current system. He eventually agreed.

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  83. Az Torch*

    Switching to anon mode for this one

    A few jobs ago I was looking to move up, and had a rare moment with the operating manager of the company while travelling. I asked him what opportunities there were and if there as a ladder for me to climb. He said there was, and that he was a great example. He started at the very bottom level and was now all but running the firm.

    It was wonderfully inspiring – or would have been if his father weren’t the founder and CEO. I appreciate that he worked his way up, but it might work a bit differently for those of us whose names aren’t literally on the letterhead.

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    1. Generic Name*

      Omgggg. That illustrates the old saying of someone being born on third base but thinking they hit a home run.

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  84. The worst*

    The minute lockdown requirements were removed where I live our CEO told us we were going back to the office full time (no hybrid option), and anyone who had a problem with it was lazy and ungrateful.

    She, however, would only come in a few days a week because she had medical conditions and had to be careful.

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  85. Ialwaysforgetmyname*

    I used to work in HR in several national parks for what’s called a concessioner (they hold the contracts to run services such as buses, food, visitor centers, etc.). The work is to put it mildly, brutal. As just one example, during season ramp up in May we got no days off, a short day was 8 hours, and many of those days were 11-13 hours. We lived in dorm housing with the rest of the employees and ate our meals in the employee dining room. Again, brutal, and you have ZERO personal life because you are living, working, and eating with the same people 24/7.

    But an exec who had transferred to our business line from a different one was always saying to the HR team “you don’t know what hard work is… in (other business line) we sometimes worked 10 hour days, 6 days per week…”

    At that point 6 days per week of 10 hour days sounded like a vacation. And she was NOT living in our dorms or eating in our employee dining room.

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  86. a name*

    I worked at a job where we would have a big push at month and especially quarter end to get orders out the door so revenue would be recorded in the current month instead of the next. I suspect the CEO’s compensation was tied to revenue per month not profit. If we were close to but not at our monthly revenue goals they would keep shipping until midnight. If they didn’t have orders to ship, they would have sales trying to drum up new ones, which then had to be entered, approved, built and shipped all after hours on the last day of the month.

    This meant that often multiple teams had to be on call to work late on the last day of the month. This was not just manufacturing and shipping teams, but also sales, order entry, etc.

    The director of the sales department was generally not needed for this push, but he wanted to “support the troops”. If it was going to be a late night, he would often head over to manufacturing to offer his support and stay there until they could go home.

    His support consisted of cracking open a beer while doing shit like sitting on the machines they had to use and generally getting in their way.

    Nothing says support like some rich dude drinking beer while you work your ass off on Halloween, missing your kid’s trick or treating, to push out some custom order that the company is selling at a loss today instead of holding and selling at a profit next week just so some other rich dude can buy another private jet.

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  87. Orange Cat Energy*

    It was June 2020. The company had been restructuring over the past year. A lot of teams were laid off and replaced. One Friday, my department was told we were slated to be laid off one year from that date because they were changing the technology that we use and outsource our jobs would be outsourced. The following Monday, the company was having it’s end of fiscal year meeting (it was over Zoom because the pandemic was happening and everyone was WFH).

    The company sent a book called “What the heck is EOS?” to all the employees. EOS stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. Folks, this book had analogies like: Imagine there is a table; sometimes seats get arranged; sometimes there’s no seat for you…a real (not) subtle hint about how you can be fired at any time. If your employer sends you this book, that’s your sign to run.

    Let’s get back to the fiscal year meeting. During this meeting, the Chief Financial Officer lists the company’s top 5 blockers (in accordance with the philosophy of the EOS book that they’re following). The CFO lists my department as one of those blockers…because there’s too much work for us to do and the company doesn’t have the capacity to hire more people. WTH…how are employees the blocker when you have more work than they could possibly do in a 40 hour work week?

    During that Zoom, I was already working on my resume when the meeting started. I resigned at the end of the year…it was their busiest time and they tried to get me to push back my last day. I have given 3 weeks notice and they wanted me to extend it by another 3 weeks. I said no. I didn’t plan to leave at that time of year. It just worked out that way.

    The CFO is actually the CEO now. And my job that was going to be outsourced…it was never outsourced. They realized that outsourcing would cost more than having people on staff. Those who remained in my department took the buyout (they had to give back their stock shares). the company hired new people to replace us.

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    2. Generic Name*

      OMG, the EOS. This book must be an offshoot of the book “Traction”, which uses the term Entrepreneurial Operating System. I actually read it at my last job, and it was…..kinda dumb. Lots of references to other dumb business books (like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I read only a portion of because about a quarter of the way through it, I thought to myself, “the most effective thing I can do right now is stop reading this book because it’s trash”).

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  88. devinpentree*

    During COVID, the head of the company for which I then worked often used video meetings to bemoan to the entire staff how difficult it was that he had to spend the pandemic at his country mansion instead of his big city apartment. Judging from his video calls, said mansion had acres of outdoor property in addition to amenities like a pool. But how he missed getting to go out and be social! Mind you, there had, by this point, been furloughs, hours cut, and wage decreases. I was living in a one-room studio and was one of the lucky ones among my colleagues.

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  89. Honeybadger*

    Years and years ago, OldCompany was bought out by a competitor. There was a big meeting with C-Suite to notify employees. For all of us that were out of the office that day, we were given notice in the afternoon that we needed to be in the office an hour earlier the next morning for a mandatory meeting as we missed the first one. This required that many of us make alternative child care and transportation arrangements for the day. We arrived and we waited. And waited. Finally, after sitting there for almost 45 minutes waiting for the meeting to start, the Chief Communications Officer came in to apologize. Turns out, none of the C-Suite were aware they needed to be there and they were scrambling to find someone to attend. She told us that this was understandable as they had been working hard on this buy out for months. Keep in mind she was excusing a team who was getting multi million dollar golden parachutes to a room full of people who were about to get laid off. Talk about tone deaf.

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  90. Not a Vorpatril*

    Minor one:
    At a previous job that was primarily physical labor we had an all-hands meeting where my grandboss gave the old “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean!” motto. Which, honestly, there were times when that may have been appropriate, as we did get downtime at times, and were definitely slacking here and there when we had slow days where we didn’t have too much to do (hourly job, but on-call during those hours for when clients had stuff we needed to do for them)

    But at this point? We had been working for a couple of months at half-manning, which for a job primarily focused on labor meant a lot of movement and running about to get stuff done, particularly since much of it was time-sensitive. I was effectively on my own or actively training new hires (which means I was doing just as much, if not more work, then if I was on my own).

    I may have made some disgruntled noises/remarks then, which either went unnoticed or were politely overlooked, but I was rather frazzled and pissed off to be hearing that statement just then.

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  91. Eleri*

    I used to work in IT at a large nonprofit organization. During 2021 – when the pandemic was still raging and gas prices were going crazy – senior leadership started talking about bringing everyone back to work full-time on-site. This made many people very upset, as most of us had been working some type of hybrid/remote schedule for 10+ years, and we absolutely killed it with service during 2020 – we received a lot of compliments from the organization at large at how well we transitioned everyone to remote. We all complained and asked “Why now?” and the CIO’s response was that “Hey, I drive 20 miles to work every day, and the gas isn’t really THAT expensive, so I think everyone just needs to suck it up and do it.” Never mind that he made way more money than the rest of us, and gas prices weren’t making much of an impact on him (he had a hybrid car, to boot). Never mind that our organization always paid the bottom 10% of industry standard for our roles, and hybrid/remote was a huge benefit that attracted talent. Never mind that we were overall a happier, healthier, more productive workforce due to WFH. All that mattered was that we had a recently renovated building and leadership wanted to see bodies in it, and feel like everyone was “collaborating and idea-sharing” (even though we all sat on web meetings all day and no one seemed to have an issue with collaboration and idea-sharing).

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  92. Young Business*

    Co-founder and CEO of a sizeable tech company. She was casually going on trips that lasted 5-6 weeks at a time. Insisted on micromanaging the crap out of all her direct reports and all operational matters despite the fact that she was away for most of the year. It absolutely affected her ability to do her job effectively.

    At a company-wide town hall someone asked where she was (innocently). She responded that she’s in Hawaii, and didn’t we know that in the remote work world you could take your laptop and work from anywhere?!

    I love how she thought her employees had the resources and ability to park ourselves in an expensive tourist locale to work. So clueless and insulting.

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  93. Rage*

    This story is less about an exec being out of touch with the reality of staff’s lives (though she was pretty dismissive of us in general) – but she was massively out of touch with the values and beliefs of the staff.

    It was a humane society. So already a low-paying yet stressful job. As anyone who has worked or volunteered in any sort of companion animal rescue org probably knows, it’s very easy to adopt out puppies and small breed adult dogs, as they are preferred to adult large breed dogs. So ED was meeting with an animal behavior specialist, the shelter manager, and one or two other people higher up in the org. The specialist and shelter manager suggested that they brainstorm ways to boost adoption rates for adult large-breed dogs.

    ED says, “Well, if they are that hard to adopt, why don’t we just…you know…not?”

    Some confusion. “Not what?”

    ED shrugged. “Offer them for adoption. We could just euthanize them all to make room for the ones that will get adopted.”

    Oh yeah that went over really well. Behaviorist (who I didn’t like, and who didn’t like me, but I had to give her props for what she did) went home after the meeting and put together a huge plan for getting adult large-breed dogs basic obedience training. She planned the whole thing – recruiting volunteers, their training, the process for training the dogs, timelines, milestones, the whole shebang. Rolled it out, within 12 months they had increased the adoption rate of adult large breed dogs by ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.

    Of course, the behaviorist herself was a bit clueless in one very specific way: she named her new program the “Canine Enrichment and Training Program”, or the CET Program.

    In the shelter world, however, the acronym CET already had a meaning. Certified Euthanasia Technician.

    Reply ↓
    2. Hlao-roo*

      Oof to the CET Program meaning two very different things. And Yikes on Bikes to the ED’s initial suggestion! But big props to the behaviorist for the large dog training program! Warms my heart that the program had such a positive effect on large dog adoption rates.

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    3. Observer*

      ED shrugged. “Offer them for adoption. We could just euthanize them all to make room for the ones that will get adopted.”

      I’m having a hard time responding in a way that’s consonant with the rules. But this woman is just . . . The *ED* of an organization whose *whole mission* is to help animals just suggesting that a whole class of non-unsafe animals just be euthanized just because?! Without even *trying* to place them?

      I also have questions about the Board who hired her, though. Because it does not sound like she actually had any concern for the actual mission.

      I get that some shelters find that they have to euthanize some animals because they cannot place them. But this is a whole other level.

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      1. Spreadsheet Hero*

        It’s a particularly ruthless calculus, but not all shelters are no-kill shelters, and sometimes that’s math you have to consider, especially if you’re in an area with crappy insurances or a lot of rentals (where certain common large breeds may really struggle to be adopted since owning that kind of dog can get you kicked out of housing). But you should never, EVER broach it that freaking casually, because what you’re proposing is a tragedy. You say that with gravitas and hesitation and “would our mission to help all local animals be better supported if we triaged? I am looking for alternatives; would somebody please help me brainstorm them”.

        The utter insane callousness and ignorance of shrugging when you talk about killing living things so the bottom lines looks better… Really makes you wonder about that chestnut about sociopaths becoming CEO’s.

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      2. Rage*

        She was rather the type of person who got into leading nonprofits because it made her look good, not because she was particularly invested in the org’s mission. As for the Board, well, it was pretty well stacked by her. We, as employees, were expressly prohibited from speaking or otherwise engaging with board members. It was a fun place [insert eye roll here].

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  94. People Gotta Eat*

    Like many these days, my coworkers are barely scraping by, expressing the desire to access free community food resources while our CEO is a trust fund baby who has been overheard referring to $1,000 as “chump change,” grousing that her staff won’t pay$7 for a hamburger to support a fundraiser, and regularly encourages company-wide potlucks to foster camaraderie, where everyone is expected to provide a dish for up to 60 employees.

    I work at a food bank.

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  95. Managercanuck*

    A previous boss (non-profit) lived out in the country and would drive to work. All the other staff members save one took transit to get to work. We live in a pretty snowy area of the world and so winter storms are pretty common. This was pre-remote work, so most of the team had desktops and other than checking our email, couldn’t really do anything from home. Nevertheless, even in winter storms, we were still expected to be working in the office, but she wouldn’t be in. She also gave special dispensation to the one staff member who drove that she could be at home too. And then, boss lady would have the gall to call us in the office and tell us how pretty the snow was around her house.

    This was the same lady who decreed that we needed to have two staff members in the office at ALL times for security’s sake. Which made it awkward if you needed to go get lunch or run an errand knowing that she’d call and ask who was in the office and ask to speak to both of you.

    I do not miss her.

    Reply ↓
    1. Managercanuck*

      What made her comments about the snow being pretty even worse was that every single one of us who took transit had to wait outdoors in the snow to catch our buses. We were not happy campers.

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  96. Ialwaysforgetmyname*

    My recent favorite that I’m still stinging from: The salary level for me and 90% of the employees in our non-profit is such that $1,000 is a meaningful amount. An about-to-retire exec told me that they plan to not touch the (extremely large!) balance in their company-funded retirement account because “I don’t need it.”

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  97. pally*

    Our CEO likes to talk about his kids regularly.
    These days he’s happy that they are finally making good money now that they are out of college.

    Only thing, he cites their salaries all the time, and they are $50K-$70K higher than what we make. And we are a couple of decades out of college. Way to make us feel valued.

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  98. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

    A couple weeks ago a senior exec (one step down from the CEO) was leading an all-hands for our division – probably about a thousand people – where he talked about the wonderful opportunities from the less-regulatory environment (in terms of merger and acquisition) from the new US presidential administration, at a time when anyone reasonable would know that at least 50% of employees (probably more, given that the majority of our offices and thus employees are in large cities in blue states) are in fact terrified about other aspects of the administration. Supremely tone-deaf – I understand focusing on that aspect is part of his job but bringing it up was just awful.

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  99. Trash Can Queen*

    My company was in the news about a year ago when our CEO sent a company-wide email at 3am saying that while it was good to be “winning” again, teams needed to have less work-life balance and work harder, giving the example of a quote they recently received to re-wire the internet cables in the office. CEO said he would have volunteered to come in on a Saturday and do it himself, because that’s how much he cared about saving the company money.

    A month later we had our third round of layoffs in two years.

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  100. Packaged Frozen Lemon Zest*

    I work for a publicly traded North American company. Our stock price has decreased by almost 20 percent, we’re getting no bonus, our preferred stock units won’t pay out any money for the next two years, and we’re underperforming by every significant business metric compared to our industry peers. Good news though: we just increased our fleet of corporate jets from one to three and rolled out a huge stock buy-back! /sarcasm

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  101. The worst*

    The minute lockdown restrictions were lifted where I live, our CEO told us that we were returning to the office full time (no hybrid option), and anyone who had a problem with that was lazy and ungrateful.

    She, however, ended up only coming in part time, because she had medical conditions and had to be careful.

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  102. soontoberetired*

    the company started layoffs to save money and talked about how we had to find ways to cut expenses. then bought a plane. and in the midst of more layoffs, bought a second plane. We know the CEO used the plane for his own vacations.

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  103. Box of Rain*

    CEO gave us all $50 gift cards for Whole Foods and said to treat ourselves and our family to a nice dinner. He loves Whole Foods, but the office is not near a Whole Foods. None of the staff live near a Whole Foods. The nearest Whole Foods is over an hour away, so if we go there it is a special occasion situation. So of course, he kept asking us what we got at Whole Foods or if we’d used our gift cards yet. I sent mine to my daughter who DOES live near a Whole Foods and she Venmo’d me $50. I used that money towards a new tattoo, so I answered that I used it for something really special and enjoyed what I got. I think I told him I got a bottle of wine. He approved.

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  104. BurnedoutEngineer*

    The company I worked for was being bought out by a company headquartered in another country. The executives traveled to our site for the transition and were presenting in a town hall. The new CEO talked about how the company set them up in temporary apartments and complained about how it was so hard to live in an apartment, do his own laundry, and get his own food. All this, to an audience of manufacturing employees who had been working mandatory overtime and weekends for the past 2 years, during COVID, with no raises. He might have been able to commiserate with his fellow executives, but we were not the right audience for that.

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  105. Only one person in this conversation is a Cybertruck owner...*

    Was denied a raise from the CEO because “I make the most money in the company, even more than me!” Doubtful, as the CEO owns multiple homes, multiple luxury cars, and a PLANE.

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    1. Only one person in this conversation is a Cybertruck owner...*

      Should have said YOU make the most money, i.e. he was claiming I make more than him, the CEO and business owner.

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  106. IT But I Can't Fix Your Computer*

    We just started hot desking. The rollout has been Not Great. Everyone is in a terrible mood. Our VP has been cheerfully reminding people that the federal government is calling people back into the office full time, as though “doing better than the US federal government” is anything but the lowest possible bar this week.

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    1. Bruce*

      One relative who works for a federal agency has said that they closed the office buildings that used to house most of the workers, so that will be interesting. Another who works for a different one says that their agency has enough desks, but people will not be able to sit anywhere near where their team is…

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      1. Abogado Avocado*

        One of our elected overlords wants to institute a RTO policy in the local government for which I work, but we are out of space and do not have enough desks and offices for everyone. And, not to mention, that we save money by having back office analysts and others not in public-facing jobs WFH. But, hey, it gets him headlines everytime he brings it up.

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  108. Arya Parya*

    This happened to my SO.

    He worked for Company A and they were merging with Company B. To celebrate they had a party at a restaurant at the beach. During the party there was a pub quiz They were divided into three teams: the employees of Company A, the employees of Company B and the C-suites of both companies. The prize was an kite surfing workshop for an afternoon or something like that. Pretty big anyway.

    Turned out all the questions were about both companies. So of course the C-suites team won, as they were the only team with people from both companies. They gave themselves the prize and were apparently very happy with it.

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  109. Chocolate Teapot*

    Not quite a work situation, but our local glossy business magazine also produces in-flight magazines, so they always have a business slant to them. Each issue there is a Me and My Wardrobe double page, and the last one I saw was a female lawyer going on about how she always has to wear Dior and Cartier jewellery.

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  110. Bruce*

    Not sure if this counts as “out of touch” or just “amazingly blunt”, but in the mid-80s my smallish (400 person) company had layoffs that were sudden, painful and had a large helping of office politics involved. In the aftermath the CEO called the engineers together and said he expected everyone to “work hard and keep your heads down… because there are bullets flying and you might catch one”, making a gesture of a gun to the head. He was a veteran of a shooting war in a small country that has had a lot of shooting wars, which added a touch of the surreal…

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  111. DEEngineer*

    When I was 6 months pregnant, my company changed the maternity benefits. Instead of full pay for the first 6 weeks, I’d have to apply for their short-term disability and get 66% pay. It was a substantial sum of money for me, and they would only make exceptions for people currently using the benefit. I don’t know which executive was responsible for this, but the company sent a company-wide email thanking the benefits leader for all the money they saved the company by cutting benefits, and posted it as a success story on their internal website.

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    1. ICodeForFood*

      For some reason, this reminds me of when my synagogue (Jewish equivalent of a church, for those who don’t know) laid off the long-time bookkeeper and forced out the long-time ofice manager, and then sent around a letter *bragging* about how they had saved money by hiring new, cheaper office staff. Incredibly tone-deaf, and just awful… the gall of the “committee” to BRAG about firing long-term employees…

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      1. iglwif*

        Ewwww.

        I am especially grossed out by this behaviour because I’m currently on my synagogue’s board and we have had to let a couple of people go (not fire them) over the past few years for performance reasons. I can’t imagine behaving that way about it!! So awful!

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  112. Don't make me come over there*

    Back when I worked at a big multinational company, our division head moved on to greener pastures. At his going away gathering, with 70ish people in attendance, he told a “funny” story about one of his first experiences in the group. He had to fill a manager-level position, did the interviews, picked his favored candidate. And then, ha-ha, his bosses said no, we like this other person better. And he said, but I really think candidate 1 will do a good job. And his bosses said, no, you’re going to hire candidate 2. And that’s how he met our colleague, who’s a great guy and who became a good friend, the end. I’m sure he thought it was a heart-warming anecdote, but it just confirmed to many of us that certain people in the organization were anointed and the hiring process for many management positions was a farce.

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  113. DEEngineer*

    I worked a small company where the President made a point to get to know the employees, at least surface-level. He was the stereotypical President: white, conservative, 72 years old, named Bob. He had served as a pilot during the Vietnam War. At his retirement party when people were giving speeches about how much they would miss the President, one of our employees born in China spoke up to say something about how when he told the President which area of China he was from (south, bordering Vietnam), the President told him that he had been there – bombing villages. To be clear, this was more of a “glad to see him go” than a “we’ll miss him” anecdote.

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  114. Wendy the Spiffy*

    Worked at a Fortune 100 company whose CEO was treated like a literal rock star. At all-hands meetings, when the employee Q&A times rolled around, he’d often tell the person with a question that they’d get a prize if they would sing their question, or make it rhyme, or whatever. Very “dance for me, monkey” vibes.

    The one that has stuck with me in the years since was at a town hall for top performers on the front line (retail stores and call centers). A young woman stood to ask a question, and he said he wouldn’t answer her unless she could give the first and last name of every single (15 or more) executives sitting on the stage. And he made her do it, pointing to each exec one after the other, and making a big deal of it anytime she didn’t know some or all of the name. I could hear her soul dying as her voice got more and more shaky with each miss. It was excruciating.

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  115. Cruciatus*

    Not quite the same thing, but in the same vein, but I used to work for one of the largest medical schools in the country (let’s just say, this is when I found this blog) and every year the local newspaper would post the salaries of the CEOs for the local non-profits and one of the founders of the medical school would always get so enraged (but it was public information). This was years ago so I’m sure her base salary is higher, but at the time it was something like $800,000 a year AND other benefits that put her over a million dollars a year (and we live in a small, affordable city). I worked there 4.5 years started out making $8 an hour and, after one job switch, left making a whopping $10.25 an hour. So at least she knew she should be upset about this information being out. But it always made us talk amongst one another why we were then paid so little.

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  116. AnneCordelia*

    My husband’s job had just had significant staff cuts. So at a an all-company meeting with what staff were still left, the president decided to give a presentation about her family’s recent cruise to Antarctica. Because that’s such an interesting destination, surely everyone would love to see her pictures!

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  117. Green Goose*

    I used to work at a nonprofit and we had a leadership change. The new CEO made a lot of changes including hiring her friend to be the Chief of the department that my team rolled up to. This Chief was very absent and just not invested in the job. One of my coworkers let it slip that this Chief was making over $350k per year which was pretty shocking considering it was a nonprofit and our entry level staff were not paid well.
    She flew in for a retreat and one of her opening lines to a group of people that were making poverty wages in the Bay Area “no one works in nonprofits for the money” ummmm YOU do! I was appalled.

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  118. Too soon not to be anon*

    This just happened last week, so going to be vague on details. We had our quarterly town hall which this time was year end recap as well. The SLT put on their show of trying to act like they are just like the rest of us. It’s the same story…. we made 7 billion dollars in revenue last year, which was short and no one is getting much of a raise or a bonus. Then followed by mass lay offs. Then they turn around and hire more levels of management. More management to tell the dwindling numbers of people who actually do the work what to do.

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  119. 2 Cents*

    At a previous small company that routinely delayed annual reviews or would win new business, but then claim poverty when it was time for raises, it was expected that the employees give a group gift to the (married) millionaire business owners. My last year there, I utterly refused. I was actively job searching anyway, and really just didn’t care. But I’d be d***ed if I was putting in money for someone who owned two houses (one a beach house), drove a Porsche, flung money around like it was nothing, but then begrudged a 2 percent raise.

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  120. nora*

    Two stories come to mind. First: end of grad school, a couple weeks from getting a masters in social work, stressing about finding a job, etc. A bunch of professionals did a panel discussion about Real Life Social Work. One of them was one of my instructors. She told us, from her very cushy position as a doubly-employed person with a wealthy spouse, not to worry about money and just “drive for Uber” for a while. I reported her to the school, anonymously, because I was terrified she would fail me. Apparently she got a talking-to about it and she has since changed her ways.

    Just a few months later, I was in my first job as a baby social worker. The executive director chose to pay me less than the person I technically supervised, knew I was planning a wedding, also knew my fiance had been laid off from his job, and was baffled and kind of angry at me for declining to attend a lunch at an expensive restaurant that the company was not covering. Probably a good thing I didn’t stay there too long.

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  121. Not me*

    There were terrible fires near us recently and I was talking to an exec about them, and they mentioned how horrible they were and how they had to hire a private fire department to…protect their hobby vineyard. Like, people’s homes were burning down, entire neighborhoods were destroyed, people died, and this person put resources into making sure that the vineyard where they make wine for a hobby was safe, and thought I’d be sympathetic to that.

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    2. Observer*

      Out of touch, to be sure. And he should have absolutely kept his mouth shut.

      But actually, any land that is protected protects everyone else. Partly because the people doing this stuff (I mean the firefighters) are not going to ignore sparks flying into the adjacent fields / homes / land. Also because And partly because any area that is kept from flaming is one less area that can be a jumping off spot for sparks and embers. Essentially being a firebrake.

      Not that I think he had the least concern for that.

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  122. Elle Woods*

    I worked a life insurance company. During a meeting with field reps, the then-CEO bragged about how he’d just bought another $1,000,000 life policy then jokingly said, “What, aren’t you agents selling those on the regular?” No one found it amusing. (The average life insurance policy agents were selling were in the $50,000-$100,000 range.)

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  123. Aerin*

    When dropping the bomb that they were dramatically increasing the on-site requirement, our president and FVP (both new on the job) kept focusing on the fun things they would do to entice people into the office. As if that’s the deciding factor, instead of things like childcare, health issues, cost of commuting, and so on and so on. Sensing he was losing the room, the president announced that they’re building an on-site handball court! This announcement included a brief presentation from the director of facilities (who was very visibly shocked and unprepared) and a mention that the president had family who worked for a local handball place and might have input on the project.

    The room instantly went from displeased to outright hostile, and I could swear that LinkedIn spontaneously installed itself on every phone in the room. The handball court was an immediate punchline among the rank-and-file. I was not the only person to file an ethics complaint, and I’m pretty sure the whole project is going to be quietly memory-holed.

    The kicker? They started off the town hall by sharing that a recent survey indicated low trust in senior management, and promising that they were going to work hard to counter that. I didn’t have any opinion of these two before that meeting, but I left it with the distinct impression that neither of them had ever talked to anyone making less than $100K a year (except for maybe their domestic staff).

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    1. L_Rons_Cupboard*

      Office ‘fun’ incentives always remind me of the finger traps/coffee koozies/waffle party on Severance.

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  124. Stella70*

    I cleaned houses to supplement my (full-time job) wages while I attended college (also full-time, but several years past the period one usually starts). Even though I was an actual DINK (double-income-no-kids), I ate ramen by the case.
    I was employed by the uber-wealthy partly because they saw the car I drove and deduced a proper thief could afford better wheels.
    One day, I found myself on my hands and knees, under a baby grand in the Grand Foyer (← the owner’s capitalization and Lord help you if you pronounced ‘foyer’ with a hard ‘r’). I was using a toothbrush to straighten the fringe on the Persian rug, so that it all laid flat and pointed in the proper direction. (I often spent this time reflecting upon being selected as “Most Likely to Succeed” of my graduating class and debated contacting them to nullify the vote.)
    Hell-en, (my preferred spelling of the owner’s name) joined me to ensure I noticed and cleaned a spot on the rug. She was quite disgruntled about the guest who caused it and asked if I ever entertained someone so rude as to spill Dom Pérignon. Hell-en was born to and married money, so there was no snark, just cluelessness.
    I sincerely replied that Boone’s Farm was removed quite readily from the AstroTurf that the prior renter had installed in my garage apartment, and in most cases, I didn’t even have to bring in a hose!
    The triple combo of Boones Farm/AstroTurf/garage caused an arc in her brain synapses, because it took her nearly a minute to acknowledge my “fanciful” imagination, and to chide that a simple “no” would have sufficed.
    During the last five minutes of my last day there, I crawled back under the baby grand, and this time, made the fringe look like it went through a tornado.

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    1. Hlao-roo*

      I am cracking up at “I was employed by the uber-wealthy partly because they saw the car I drove and deduced a proper thief could afford better wheels.” XD

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    2. ferrina*

      Kids these days, just spilling their Dom Perignon everywhere! Have you ever heard of such a thing?!

      Truthfully, no.

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  125. LostCommenter*

    My story is tame compared to these stories, but our CEO came to work every few months in the new car he just bought. Ferrari, Lamborghini etc. And I was struggling to make ends meet with a title of “junior manager” on my payslip to indicate why I’m not getting overtime pay despite working 80 hour weeks. It was once explained to me that my contributions made it possible for the CEO to get his new car, even though they had excuses each year at my performance review why they couldn’t justify my raise. So every time I’d get home and complain to my partner about something the company/management did again, he’d simply say “Lamborghini”.

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  126. stelms_elms*

    We have a fairly new VP for our division who has been here for a total of five months. She gets paid $40K more than the previous VP who was here for 25 years. She just brought in an AVP who was hand-selected (no hiring process), who we have no idea what they will be doing. She has retained three different consultants to fix things that might be bent but definitely aren’t broken, all to the tune of a half million dollars. Meanwhile, we’re all being asked to do a “budget realignment” exercise to cut our budgets by three different percentages to see what we can withstand while still providing a semblance of the same level of service.

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    1. Kendall^2*

      That reminds me of PreviousEmployer, a private university, that paid consultants who knows how much money to evaluate just how under market current wages were. I got an adjustment because of it (upward, thankfully), but still am peeved that it could have been so much more for all of us low-paid folks had they not contracted expensive consultants!

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  127. jaques*

    I worked at a small business owned by someone who previously had been an executive at large, global companies. She would berate me about our sales and say we needed to be better because she “had a mortgage to pay”. She lived in a multi-million dollar home in the wealthy area of our city. I was working 70+ hour weeks for $30k a year and could barely afford my portion of rent on my crappy apartment. (I was young and didn’t understand the working world well enough to advocate for myself. I only lasted about 3 months there, and the business went under not long after.)

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  128. Wonky Policy Wonk*

    I’m a civil servant and I’ve seen a lot of ridiculous, out of touch moments from leadership (either politicians or political appointees) in the various departments I’ve worked in, but there’s one that literally made my jaw drop. We had a new Minister and his staff come in to tour the department’s office and do a quick meet-and-greet with staff and upper management (just below the political appointee level) sprung for coffee and assorted baked goods for the occasion. Important background – our government had instituted a “fiscal restraint” policy a couple years before and were no longer covering the cost of most “non-essential” office expense, which included things like coffee and snacks for meetings. The policy was so restrictive that we had to create an entire business case, power point presentation and executive summary included, for why notebooks were “essential” so we didn’t have to take notes on random pieces of printer paper and post-its.

    So there’s the Minister, sipping on the coffee and eating a muffin paid for by his department’s staff that is at least four pay bands below him, and someone asks if he plans to make any changes to the expense policy. His face lights up and he starts going off on how ridiculous the policy is, all the department staff is PUMPED thinking we’ve got an ally on our fight against asinine office spending restrictions, and then it becomes clear the more he talks that it’s the executive expense policy he’s against. He finds it absolutely humiliating to have to use a 5 year old, domestically produced sedan as a work vehicle and it’s completely outdated that they won’t allow him to expense tips on working lunches, don’t even get him started on the ridiculously low budget for new office furniture! He went on for at least 20 very excruciating minutes about how he was working to bring the executive spending policy inline with what he was getting in the private sector, because how else do you attract high level executives to go into politics (*insert massive eye roll here*)?

    I think it was a surprise to no one who met him that day that when we renegotiated our collective agreement, government staff are unionized in my jurisdiction, he made a bunch of comments to the media that we were all overpaid and greedy bureaucrats that were out of touch with what the average office worker was entitled to. An absolute ass hat with no self-awareness.

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  129. WhoKnows*

    One of my favorites…

    During Covid, the head of our department bought a weekend/vacation home in the suburbs. Her housekeeper would routinely walk behind her on Zoom calls, cleaning up and emptying trash cans, while the dept head ignored her existence. And then one day she says, “Have you guys ever heard of Overstock.com? I have been trying to decorate the new house and they have so much stuff for great prices!” Cue the rest of us immediately in side chats on slack being like – the 15 of us in our 20s and 30s? Yeah. We have heard of the website that sells cheap stuff.

    Also, when we were told that we had to go back to the office (a full year before anyone else in our industry did), she said “I know a lot of you are really anxious about having to come back to the office, and I just want you to know, you should feel free to feel that way.”

    She wasn’t cruel…mostly just oblivious.

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  130. EarlGrey*

    I’ve heard my share of oblivious “my vacation property” conversations from higher ups but the one that sticks in my mind isn’t financial. The president of the company was announcing triumphantly that we had landed a big client. We’d been doing a few months of work for them and got to a milestone approval that meant a longer term contract. Great news! Except the way he praised the team who’d been doing the work sounded SO miserable. The client would call at 6 in the morning! They’d expect late nights and weekends! They wanted a hundred versions of the work with tiny changes and then demanded half of it be done over! And the team STEPPED UP and GOT IT DONE!

    My side chats quickly turned into “…is this supposed to be good news?” It felt very much like celebration from the guy who’d be taking the credit while the front line team was locked into another few years of completely unreasonable expectations for work hours and perfectionist standards.

    Reply ↓
  131. Lemons*

    I’ve worked at multiple “cool” offices where the owners would complain we weren’t being cool enough because we weren’t blasting music, even though a lot of the tasks workers were doing required quiet concentration, like writing and research.

    Reply ↓
    1. Workerbee*

      Oh, god, flashbacks to when I was in a Marketing & Communications department and our CMO complained that people complained we were too quiet. Apparently we were supposed to be running around being all markety and loudly proclaiming Great Ideas with accompanying light shows.

      In reality, we were…concentrating on writing effective copy. Designing accessible visuals. Having non-loud meetings about projects. Meeting our deadlines. All of which takes some form of dedicated presence.

      Reply ↓
  132. DramaQ*

    We keep getting reminded of how bad our company stock is doing and there are “budget restraints” blah blah which are likely going to translate into us peons not getting bonuses.

    At our last department meeting our director bragged that our head of department has despite teh company not having money managed to secure a week long meeting for all of us in Chicago that is costing $1000+ to send everyone to from my location. There are about 150 of us here vs 12 in Chicago.

    Our CEO wants to have it in Chicago because he doesn’t like Omaha and doesn’t want to fly he doesn’t see the need. So all us peons have to use up a week we could be working to go to Chicago while aware that the cost of this could pay many people’s salaries for a year.

    All so we can listen to VPs complain about how they can’t understand why nobody wants to work anymore and where did company loyalty go and how you have no business working for this company if you aren’t lying awake on Sunday evening shaking with anticipation to come in on Monday.

    I wish I was making that up that was last year’s meeting. My husband still thinks I am making it up and I told him if I was that creative I wouldn’t be working for these people I’d be making bank writing books.

    Reply ↓
    1. Roy G. Biv*

      “how you have no business working for this company if you aren’t lying awake on Sunday evening shaking with anticipation to come in on Monday.”

      wow. just wow.

      Reply ↓
  133. fran*

    Upper management for health care org who weren’t front line got covid shots before they were readily available for all front-line health care workers. Later when vaccines more widely available, director of public health lectured us to go get our boosters because they were on their fourth covid infection. This is the same nitwit who informed us there was no way to know if or when the pandemic would get worse because apparently epidemiology or even math about exponential growth do not exist. That fall their region had some of the highest covid hospitalization rates and covid deaths in the country during Delta.

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  134. Anon for reasons*

    Changing my tag to be in stealth mode… I worked for a company where the CEO repeatedly bragged about how he sacrificed his marriage for his job, he expected his staff to put their job ahead of their marriages, and one time he called on a group of us to put our hands up if we were divorced. That time I was really glad my wife was not in attendance! Another time at a party he got cussed out by the wife of one of my co-workers after he made comments like this.

    Reply ↓
  135. just let me park my tiny car*

    We had a serious parking shortage at our old building. During construction of the new building, we were assured that they would solve the problem. We move into the new building; there is not enough parking for us plebs.

    Higher-ups have assigned parking spaces. Fine, I guess that’s pretty standard. Except the CEO has TWO spaces next to each other, both with his name on them. Whichever luxury car he drove to the office that day gets parked across both spaces.

    It’s not the only thing that drives me crazy, but it’s the most visible one.

    Reply ↓
  136. Hotdog not dog*

    I supported an executive who owned 3 homes, sent his children to pricey private schools, drove luxury vehicles, etc. At the time I was making the lower end of the salary range for my role. Due to a medical situation, Mr. Executive was out for about 12 weeks, during which time I kept his whole business running smoothly. Fortunately, he recovered and said he was very grateful for my “stepping up to the plate”.
    He was full of praise until I asked for a salary increase to bring me closer to the midrange of my job title, and then all of a sudden I was “taking food from his children’s mouths” and being “ungrateful for the opportunity” to learn to do his job on top of mine.
    Same executive, about a year later, started talking about retirement. Because he was the only one I supported, I asked him how his retirement would impact me. (It was normal in that company for the EA to either be reassigned to a hand-picked role, usually a step up, or let go altogether.) His response was, “Oh, you’re a decent EA. You’ll figure something out.”
    Spoiler: I did figure something out, and boy was he mad when I “left him high and dry” a few weeks later.

    Reply ↓
  137. EMP*

    We got periodic reminders from HR that we did not have a remote work policy and all employees should be working from the office…while our CEO was working from his second home in Florida.

    Reply ↓
  138. Nonprofit peon*

    The Associate VP (100+ direct and indirect reports) who moaned to a junior junior manager (8 direct reports) about how toxic their workplace is.

    Reply ↓
    1. froodle*

      oh wow that must have been so hard for that poor Associate VP… if only he was in a position to do something about a toxic workplace culture… alas…

      Reply ↓
  139. It's Thursday!*

    I work in a ten story building. The elevators are constantly breaking…and it’s a very busy building so being down to one causes a lot of delays and having none – well it’s just a problem of course not everyone can walk up 10 floors and some of the upper rooms contain equipment that can’t be moved.
    we asked about plans to deal with the elevators and the VP (who did not work in our building and at the time had their knee in a brace and was using a cane) dismissed our concerns and said it wasn’t a big deal – we always had at least one and more people could just use the stairs.
    Well a month later we lost all the elevators for two months causing huge work disruptions (and $$$) – during all that time the VP never once climbed the stairs to our 7th floor offices. They are now “fixed” but still regularly down to one and there are no plans to do anything concrete

    Reply ↓
  140. anononon*

    He’s not an executive, but my boss, after:
    – not giving me anything for Christmas — I did not expect or even particularly want anything from him, but it is apparently the norm in this office for bosses to give support staff presents;
    – complaining that people were taking their remaining PTO at the end of the year;
    – being particularly upset that the office was closed on Christmas Eve and that his peers in the company were letting that stand instead of insisting on making support staff work that day;

    had the audacity to complain to me that he didn’t get any Christmas presents and only one Christmas card this year, and complained that “the world has changed so much,” because he used to get so many presents that they filled the living room of his (large, suburban) house. Such a weird, out-of-touch tantrum to have. I had previously been more tolerant of his annoyance that the whole world stops in late December, because we’re both Jewish and this year the state set a major deadline during Rosh Hashanah, meaning one of our clients urgently needed to sign a document during a period of time where he was not only busy with temple, but also religiously obligated not to use electronic devices or handle any business concerns. But all that and then complaining about not getting Christmas presents???

    Reply ↓
  141. Workerbee*

    Was in a small workplace that really didn’t like people working from home, but you could appeal with a special case. HR left it up to individual managers at that point.

    However, lower-level executive staff (not C-suite, but all the guys just below C-suite with “Senior Director” in their title) were expected to be on-site.

    My team reported directly to one of those.

    A teammate asked to work from home 2 days a week on a very temporary basis (medical issue).

    Senior Director: “If anyone should be able to work from home, it’s me, because I have a long commute. Since I can’t, there’s no way I can have it happen for you.”

    Reply ↓
    1. Workerbee*

      (hit Submit too soon)
      Perhaps more to the point, this was the same person who fired one of our program managers for not anticipating the Covid pandemic that stalled one of our main projects. “She should have planned for any surprises,” he said.

      Nobody wept when he himself finally got fired.

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  142. A Teacher*

    I teach in a public school and every morning during second hour, we do the pretty much standard pledge. My principal likes to add before the pledge “Please stand for the BEST country in the world in honor of all those that sacrificed for it.” Hint: most don’t stand and none say the pledge, including teachers. Until last week the BEST country in the world was annoying. Now it is out of touch and tone deaf. I teach in a blue state and our district had to republish it’s Safe Haven policy last week because of the ICE raids. Telling my building, which is the most diverse building in this part of the state, with over 100 languages spoken, that we are the BEST when many of the kids are fearful for their family, friends, and themselves for being not White is really out of touch and tone deaf.

    Reply ↓
  143. Charlotte Lucas*

    The debate on whether it is worse to lay people off at the beginning or end of the day/week is settled. It’s officially the middle of Christmas Eve before the company party.

    Reply ↓
  144. AnonToday*

    Ooh, our executives can be really out of touch. Two in particular will randomly reference their au pairs and one went on at length about how they just buy their child whatever they want, no matter what cost, while the rest of the table (all staff level) was discussing how expensive raising our kids has been.

    During onboarding, more than one on the admin team gushed about one of the executives’ penchant for designer clothes as if it were a cutesy quirk. The executives’ stock activity is public knowledge, so I know the designer clothes person made over a million last year on top of their salary and bonuses.

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  145. CheeseHead*

    My example is surprising because it comes from the other direction. Our CEO/business owner came from an upper middle-class background and was pretty much in denial about the fact that owning a billion-dollar company made her a billionaire. She was wildly inconsistent about what she thought was worth spending money on.

    This resulted in the surreal experience of having a our billionaire CEO spend a significant chunk of an all-hands meeting of 10,000 employees lecturing us about not stealing or losing the branded pens. She’d eaten out recently, and the server had given her one of her own company’s branded pens to sign the check, which meant that one of her 10,000 employees had taken one from the building and left it at the restaurant. She’d also heard that some people threw them away when they ran out of ink; didn’t we know she paid nearly $1 per pen for the high-quality refillable kind? As for stealing pens from the company and using them at home, that was completely unacceptable. True, she herself did so occasionally, but only pens that were already broken or leaking!

    Given the number of employees and the salaries involved, that lecture about pens cost roughly $100,000.

    Reply ↓
        1. Hlao-roo*

          I once had a pen that said, “This pen was stolen from [business name].” No idea how I ended up with that pen, as I had never been to nor heard of the business in question, but it was one of my favorite pens because I loved that it said it was stolen right on it. (I think I threw it away when it ran out of ink, a move that would further dismay the CEO in CheeseHead’s comment.)

          Reply ↓
          1. Lexi Vipond*

            I was given a pen to use that said it had been stolen from So-and-So’s hairdressers – when I was acting as a juror in the High Court!

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      2. ICodeForFood*

        Yes… Which reminds me of the experience of a friend of mine, who was a sales rep at the time. Her employer had ordered some promotional items (I don’t remember what they were), and her boss refused to let her or any of the other sales people give them to customers and prospects, because “They cost a lot of money.” So the only people who were reminded of the company name were those who occasionally saw them in the locked supply closet that they could not be removed from.

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  146. WillowSunstar*

    I am in a company that is laying off hundreds of employees. Yes, I’m one of them. We had a town hall this week that was the most out-of-touch town hall I’ve ever seen, and I’m middle-aged, so I have seen quite a few. Over half the meeting was all the leadership staff patting themselves on their backs for the new, “excellent” first quarter numbers, and we all knew the numbers were the results of the layoffs. I didn’t see any non-leadership employees get recognized for anything except work anniversaries, and who knows how many of them were being laid off. Last week, they also announced more layoffs coming this year.

    Also the main nod to the layoffs was “we’re in transition” and “people now have career opportunities” (there’s a hiring freeze in the company). The safety moment was this mental health app that you only get a free membership to if you are a current employee, and it’s expensive if you are not.

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  147. Project Manager*

    My second job out of grad school was as a Residence Director, they paid us a $27,000 salary in addition to the free housing. Our Dean of Students, who frequently credited the fact he and his wife had so much money was because they never had kids, told us we should be saving the amount of rent we’d normally pay each month to be able to buy a house in the future. In Denver, that was half our salary, and with student loan debt and other bills, utterly out of touch.

    Reply ↓
    1. ferrina*

      You wouldn’t have been able to pay rent with that kind of salary anyways. The free housing is how they can afford to still hire people.

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  148. Amber Rose*

    Some years back, after doing some layoffs and cutting hours, management said we were still doing the annual company camping trip and pig roast. Every employee knew the camping trip was only so they could show off their new, fancy campers. Also the friggin pig roast while some of us were worried about buying groceries.

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  149. Cabbagepants*

    I work in the research division of a larger company. We pay a handsome sum to rent laboratory space, and we’ve been very successful and made a lot of money for the company — much more than our costs. Furthermore, this lab generates 90% of the revenue for my division.

    Recently during an all-hands meeting discussing budget cuts, our division head complained bitterly about the cost of renting the lab space and said that the way of the future is to just license existing IP.

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  150. JM*

    During Covid, the senior leadership of a multi-billion dollar company was discussing how to get people to come back to the office while many restrictions were still in place. Someone brought up that parents had kids who were not able to go back to school yet. The CEO (a woman) said, they should just hire a nanny.

    ……sure, because everyone has tens of thousands of dollars of disposable laying around to hire a private nanny.

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  151. Posy*

    My first job out of uni, I had a boss who was very posh. Her kids were all into horses; the eldest was some kind of dressage champion. One of my colleagues once went shopping during lunchtime and was showing off her purchases, including a potato masher. The boss replied:  Oh, new stirrups for your horse, how nice!

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  152. JJ*

    Years ago, I worked for an auto insurance company in California. The owner had taken over from his father, and his wife ran HR. I’d been warned the place was a nightmare and the owners were awful, but I was desperate to get back to work, and a friend worked there, so I gave it a shot.

    There are plenty of stories, but one that really stuck with me was when they made us take mandatory furlough days every month to “help the company save money.” They claimed it was temporary, but it dragged on for at least two years before I finally rage-quit.

    Not long after the announcement, I was walking out with a friend when we spotted six brand-new Porsches lined up in the owners’ parking spots. Turns out, the owner had them delivered so he could test drive them and decide which two he and his wife wanted. This was right in front of all the employees who’d been dealing with pay cuts and three years without a raise.

    After I left, I heard the company got sued into oblivion and the owners lost everything. Can’t say I was shocked.

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    1. NoIWontFixYourComputer*

      I remember something like that… Must have been back in the ’80s. I worked for a major defense contractor.
      Anyways, one day the company announced layoffs. Later that afternoon, senior management was seen in the parking lot arguing about who got which company cars.

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  153. Varthema*

    The CEO of my former company laid people off while driving his car. On the way to the airport. For his trip to the Maldives. During the pandemic.

    (can’t remember if it was 2020 or 2021).

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  154. As I Live and Breathe, Raisin?!*

    While the upper management has fortunately been pretty close-lipped about their spoils (I only learned after two years that one of our CEOs lived in another state and flew in every week) the middle management has been surprisingly clueless. As the lowest paid person in the office I have been told a story about one person’s 3bdr/2bth STARTER home and been consistently questioned by a supervisor why I have not bought a house when we live in an area where 70s fixer-uppers start at $500k. When I said I couldn’t afford it he said “sure you can!”

    Reply ↓
    1. ferrina*

      It’s hilarious/terrifying when people who claim to be experts in finances/economics are surprised that many people can’t afford to buy a house, or that many younger employees have student loans. Um, yeah, that’s a reality for lots of people (particularly Americans with the student loans). Business people forget to do the numbers.

      Reply ↓
      1. Aerin*

        In any article where someone explains their secret to setting themselves up for financial independence, you’ll find about 4-5 paragraphs in that they very briefly mention the person’s actual secret: a large amount of money from their parents

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  155. Kelli with an I*

    Granted this isn’t as bad as the others here but my boss renovated his house, bought his daughter a new car, took a cruise, and a weeklong trip to the mountains. We usually got an end of season bonus in June. Well September rolls around without the promised bonus and everyone was too afraid to ask until one brave soul spoke up. The boss forgot about bonuses. This was after we were all working 6 days a week for almost 9 hours. I don’t work there anymore and will not work for a family business again.

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  156. Cauliflower Queen*

    The company I worked for got bought out. The (all white male) execs of the purchasing company came out for a “get to know you” lunch and did a little presentation on the new company and a little bit about each of them. Including their hobbies – every one of them was golfing, sailing, horses, travel. Oh thank you sirs, these manufacturing floor employees can totally relate to you now.

    Reply ↓
    1. froodle*

      I interviewed at a company for an investment and insurance administrator role(£27-£30K salary range back in 2022) and one of the interviewees asked me about my hobbies then blarted at length about how much he enjoyed skiing

      (our location is somewhere where you’d have to take a lengthy and pricy plane trip to find somewhere to ski).

      I’m sure skiing is perfectly lovely, but I really enjoy “making rent” and “buying groceries” so, yeah

      I didn’t get an offer, and the feedback to the agency was that I didn’t seem like a good fit.

      Okay rich boys.

      Reply ↓
  157. dcatron*

    Way back in the early 90s I was working for an established eye doctor. His wife was the “office manager” and we saw her maybe twice a week. My husband was active duty air force E3 and I think I was maybe making $5.50/hr, so yes, barely making ends meet. The last year I was there, the rank and file employees didn’t get any raises, not even a quarter. The wife soon comes in sporting a new anniversary diamond solitaire that was the size of a robin’s egg. So large a patient saw it and asked “is it heavy?” I can laugh about it….now.

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  158. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    My Boss is the CEO, and is treated with fawning deference by most people in the company. Because of this, whenever one of her Management Team brings a concern to her attention about employees treating them and others rudely or disrespectfully, she has said “I have never seen them act like that.” Of course you haven’t, they fawn over you.

    She was shocked when someone the Management Team knows to be rude, disrespectful and regularly quite nasty to most people made a mistake and showed off their behavior in an email, which I promptly forwarded to her. Yeah Boss, now you can see what the rest of us put up with from this person.

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  159. FricketyFrack*

    This guy wasn’t an exec, just upper management, but he was also one of the biggest jerks I’ve ever worked with. Like a lot of places, we had layoffs in 2011, and apparently our department was told that they had to eliminate one of the three people in his position. This was state government, and he’d worked there forever and had maxed out his possible pension amount, so he absolutely could’ve retired at any point. Instead, he decided to stay and the one with the least seniority (who also had kids in daycare) lost his job instead. Ok, that’s allowed, kind of crappy but technically how the rules worked. Except then he walked around the office with zero self-awareness talking about how cool it was going to be to retire on 12/12/12 and all the fun (expensive) stuff he was planning to do after that.

    The guy was a condescending jackass anyway, but I lost any respect I had for him at that point. Thankfully? I was also laid off, but I was fortunate enough to get another offer pretty quickly, so I didn’t have to look at his smug face much longer.

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  160. Nothing Creative*

    At a company wide town hall meeting, mostly listening to the upper management praise each other, the president gushed on and on how the VP helped her kid get into (local private school here) where the yearly tuition was more than most people on that call made in a year.

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  161. CS*

    My old company tried to rescind a well deserved raise my manager had gotten, revoking the salary she’d negotiated back to a lower hourly pay. Small company so our customer service department was just her and me. She quit with no notice (as she should) and without wrapping anything up. New owner called me and spent an hour complaining about how could she do this to the company, asking me to see if I could get in touch with her and convince her to stay, which I did not feel comfortable doing because she had every right to quit under the circumstances. Then he started a get to know you conversation with me talking about how him and some friends sailed around the Caribbean for a few months. I was making 28k a year and was about to have to take over all my managers work because he cut her pay and she quit. More shady stuff continued to happen under the new ownership and when I was applying for new jobs after a layoff the company would not reply to any prospective employers to even confirm I worked there for 10 years. Had to dig out my old tax forms to prove employment. Such a horrible person. Glad I’m out of there!

    Reply ↓
  162. Our Lady of Shining Eels*

    Not exactly a CEO, but the president of our union local, was a) self-described best friends with the head of HR, b) was on vacation when COVID hit, and was pissed that he had to end his vacation early, and c) told us we were all doing nothing and just sitting at home twiddling our thumbs when most of us were working virtually, through a pandemic, when living in an epicenter.

    He also had what many of us thought was a collection of Faberge eggs that we all would stare at during virtual union meetings – where he would yell and tell us that we were all lying, because best friend told him we were lying.

    He saw the writing on the wall and retired.

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  163. Miss Chanandler Bong*

    Right before I was laid off, my company was acquired. I saw the writing on the wall and knew my role was going to be eliminated. But someone at an all hands meeting asked the CEO if we could expect layoffs.

    Rather than say something like “we don’t have information on that at this time”, the CEO said “Keep working hard and that won’t happen.”

    Spoiler alert: many, many people lost their jobs, including some employees who had been there for decades.

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  164. Lisa Frank*

    I worked at an arts nonprofit and many people were laid off in the Great Layoffs of 2020. 100% of the people laid off were getting emails from the development dept asking for donations! Some of us were added to that list AFTER we were laid off. We had to ask several times to be taken off the list. They finally took us off those lists after there were some articles in industry papers and magazines about it.

    Reply ↓
    1. Lisa Frank*

      Oh! I forgot to add that 1) of those they kept on, some of them, not all, were given “reduced” hours, even though everyone was salaried. So in theory they would be doing 50% of the work for 50% of their former pay, but it’s nonprofit and everyone puts in more hours. So those with a reduced salary did just as much work as before. Also 2) most of the POC and Black people were laid off, but they kept a few on bc optics are the most important.

      So guess who were the only people that were affected by the reduced salary?

      Say it with me: The remaining POC and Black people.

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  165. The Badger of the Sea*

    My company implemented a brand new HRIS/Payroll system and it was a full year’s job for our entire department (HR) and our Finance department. Our CFO was also our VP and HR/Finance both reported to him. HR was left behind on everything the CFO did but we stayed in our lane for the most part.

    CFO was refusing to re-up our contracts while getting all the ones for Finance done early. He was also stalling on stipends to pay us for extra work during implementation, but Finance was getting theirs with no issue.

    He was tired of our questions and called an impromptu meeting with our whole department where he raked us over the coals for “wanting more than we deserve” re: continuing to have gainful employment. Then he tried to play the pity card by saying he also wasn’t getting a stipend for extra work during implementation. The man makes almost five times more than what our most tenured employee in our department makes.

    Our CEO didn’t appreciate hearing that when we all requested a meeting with him the following week to share what had happened. Apparently CFO had also shared his side and it didn’t line up with what we said. It was our word vs. his, but there’s 12 of us and 1 of him.

    We got our stipends, they also were retroactive, and our contracts were renewed within 48 hours. We’re also under a new VP now. :)

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  166. Morris Alanisette*

    This isn’t my story but my spouse’s. A few years ago, his company laid off about 25% of their team (my spouse was spared).

    The NEXT day, the CEO’s admin sent a message around to the company offering up the CEO’s Palm Springs vacation house for Coachella for an “employee discount rate” of $8k per night!

    (My spouse no longer works there)

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  167. Ruby*

    Our company president had a meeting to announce layoffs. He assured us that he knew what we were going through because his daughter also works here, and she’s worried about her job.
    Said company president is the son of the former company president.

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  169. 653-CXK*

    At ExJob, we would have quarterly all-staff meetings, where upper management would give us updates, etc.

    At one particular meeting, the director at the time went off on an unhinged, angry tirade about China and Walmart. Only problem – the majority of the people at the staff meeting were Asian. There were quite a few gasps and moans about this tantrum; whether a few people went to HR after this was unknown, but it certainly gave us a far more negative impression of them. (Upper management wasn’t exactly kind to POC, and this particular director was even worse.)

    The director did get their comeuppance a few years later, however – they decided to mouth off to the wrong person – probably a big muck-a-muck – and by then their bosses decided they had enough of their shenanigans and fired them. Karma was a patient mistress, and I would have paid money to watch them escort this awful, nasty director out of the building.

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  170. Middle manager*

    A few years ago, our company raised our health insurance rates by a lot. In our management talks, my grandboss noted that this was a real burden on the younger employees, since they were paid less in general. “For us, it’s just a trip to Paris,” she said. Um, lady, you may have Paris-trip money, but down in middle management, I certainly didn’t. And while I was definitely better set to absorb that rate rise than those I managed, it was a lot harder to deal with than just not going to Paris that year.

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  171. Betty Spaghetti*

    I have 2 good stories for this! 1- We were having a routine all-staff meeting, when the division head decided to go-off topic for his presentation about the budget. He spent a good amount of time telling all employees that the outlook was dire, but we all needed to be saving more for retirement. The kicker? He followed that all up with how his advice didn’t apply to him, because he “is rich”.

    2- I was working at a small, private company when all of upper management decided to buy themselves new company cars. For months afterwards, us lower peons heard nothing but complaints about how upper management didn’t like the color of their new cars, or the lack of cup holders or blah blah blah. During this period, there was an all-staff presentation that was geared towards (again) the lower peons looking ahead to retirement and adjusting our 401k accordingly. Things were so dire, we all realized we’d never be able to retire on our wages, and people left the meeting openly crying.

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    1. Betty Spaghetti*

      I have another story from the same place as #2 above! A few years before I was hired (I took this job out of absolute desperation, please keep this in mind), they had mass layoffs. This is how they approached it. Suddenly one morning, all employees were invited to a non-descript meeting. Folks started talking, and it turned out you were either invited to a meeting in room A or room B. You can see where this is going. Folks in room A were told their jobs were safe, but all of their colleagues in room B were being fired, en-masse. Effective immediately. Employees who used company cars for commuting were not able to take them home, obviously, and so were now stranded at work. In an area with no public transportation.

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  172. pinyata*

    I mean, just any time our administrator complains about how large a chunk of our salaries take up in the budget (bargained for in our union contract) when she makes 3-10 times as much as we do. Don’t try to shame us for earning a living and advocating for a living wage.

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  173. Fluffy Initiative*

    In summer 2020 my former company got a new CEO. He decided to introduce himself via email with a short bio. So far so good!
    The bio included that he was currently sailing his boat (yacht?) around the Mediterranean with his [20 year younger, former Olympian] fiancée and his parents, before heading back to the US where he split his time between his apartments in NYC and Seattle. Meanwhile, most of us hadn’t left our homes for more than groceries since the pandemic started.
    Oh, and he continued his fun little monthly newsletter with the subtle title “From the Helm”, in case we all forgot that he had a yacht. Did I mention the company had frozen our 401K contributions and all promotions and raises due to “pandemic uncertainty”? It was GREAT for morale.

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  174. Nickel n dimed*

    Not really a CEO but when I worked as an hourly personal assistant one client bitched constantly about paying for my parking ($20/ day, a steal) because I should just be able to park for free on the street in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan (this was during the pandemic before the vaccine and my employer specifically included the parking because they didn’t want employees on mass transit)
    The client also continually complained to me about how expensive I was as they were going through their annual budget. They spent something like 5x as much on their club memberships (which they almost never used even after the pandemic had waned) than on my salary (which included my company’s cut).

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  175. Desk Drone*

    During the Covid lockdowns after we were told we needed to take salary reductions and a PPP loan to stay afloat, we had to repeatedly hear all about the CEO and CFO’s shore houses and how they spend the weekend together on the beach since they live so close by.

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  176. ferrina*

    My VP tanked my annual review. She didn’t give me credit for several projects I had done, and evaluated me based on goals that were not for my role. She didn’t read my self-review, which had included these projects and documentation of howthis VP had changed my goals.

    The annual reviews were tied to raises and bonuses. I asked my VP to re-review, since the poor review she gave me put me below the bonus threshold (again, because she didn’t include several things she was obligated to include).

    She reviewed, realized that she would be scolded by HR if she tried to retroactively change the review, and told me that she wouldn’t be changing the review. She tried to console me by saying “The bonus would have been 2% of your salary, and at your salary that’s not even that much money!”

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  177. I Super Believe In You, Tad Cooper*

    Years ago I was an SME at a tiny start-up that was constantly in hair-on-fire, wheels-off-the-bus mode, and that claimed they had zero tolerance for workaholics–despite the fact that bonuses were based in part off how many nights and weekends you worked.

    One day, I got a request at 11:45–just as I was getting lunch out of the fridge–for a meeting with leadership at 12. I decided to wait until after the meeting for lunch. 12 turned into 12:15, turned into 12:30… and finally at 1 the CEO cancelled the meeting.

    I was starving at this point, so I went to the office kitchen, heated up a burrito, and took it to my desk to eat while I tried to make a tight deadline. As soon as I sat down, I realized I had forgotten to get a knife and fork. I went back to the kitchen, got the knife and fork, and turned to go back to my desk–but instead ran into the leadership team I was supposed to have the meeting with.

    The CEO flagged me down and said “Oh, hey, I know you’re about to go eat but while I have you—” and started to run through 20 minutes of big-picture questions about our strategy for a particular client we just won, where I was expected to provide key information and help plan everything out. All while standing there, holding a knife and a fork.

    Then the conversation pivoted to another half-hour of them lamenting our hiring struggles, and saying how important it was to bring in more employees to help me execute on all the major projects I was currently handling solo. After all, they said, they wanted to be sure they were taking good care of me, and they strove for an excellent culture with good work-life balance.

    –As I am standing there, holding a knife and a fork, at 1:45 in the afternoon, and my lunch has gotten ice cold.

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  178. Doc*

    I used to work for a large century-old company that was still “family owned” in that one of the founding partners’ granddaughters had inherited the business despite never having contributed actual work to it. I used to call her CEO Barbie because in addition to looking the part, playing dressup was about the extent of her professional acumen.
    This company did an annual charity campaign for which employees voted on the beneficiary and were heavily encouraged though not technically required to donate. One year the selected charity was an organization that gave once-in-a-lifetime experiences to terminally ill children. Not my preference but nothing objectionable, so I just deleted the “reminder” emails and continued contributing privately to causes closer to me.
    One day an URGENT!!! company-wide email went out just BURSTING with ALL CAPS and EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!, in which CEO Barbie was SO EXCITED to tell us about her recent appointment to the board of that year’s charity, which gave us the EXCITING OPPORTUNITY to participate in an additional campaign to … bring one specific child from Western Europe to the U.S. for the world championship of a country club sport.
    Barbie was so enthused about this campaign that she hijacked the (mandatory) quarterly all-hands town hall meeting that week to convince us to join in. The stated goal was for the child’s trip to be 100% funded through 100% employee participation.
    Most of us already hated those meetings. They weren’t so much an opportunity for thousands of people across three countries to learn how the company was doing as they were a back-patting session for executives with a captive audience. So just imagine the collective reaction Barbie got when she took the stage in her conspicuously logoed dress and shoes (you know the ones) to implore us all to pitch in for an excursion that cost less than her monthly salon expenses. This woman stood up in front of God and everyone to say, verbatim, “I know a lot of you have trouble making ends meet, but…”
    She wasn’t wrong about that part. And why did we have trouble making ends meet? Because paying below-market salaries was baked in to the company’s business model, a critical pillar of the sales pitch used to sign all of our clients, which we all learned after we started working and found out how much the people we replaced used to make.

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  179. pally*

    The CFO asked me about what places I could afford in the local housing market as she’s got a son out shopping for real estate. I mentioned a few places but couldn’t afford much.

    She wrinkled up her nose at my suggestions. She pointed out that I ought to look at some places close to where she lives. They were much nicer. Yeah, they were. And all of which were wildly outside of my budget.

    But her son could afford these places. Why couldn’t I?

    Thanks for rubbing it in.

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  180. Cat Stepmom*

    I worked at a non-profit as an AmeriCorps member, earning $14k a year to run the volunteer program. My team and I were all on SNAP benefits, and the on-site food pantry gave us first dibs on extra perishables to help make ends meet.
    Several months in, the CEO (earning six figures) took a major donor on a tour of the office. When they reached our desks, he loudly announced that we were the “free labor,” with a laugh. He was an awkward guy, and I don’t think he meant any harm, but he fostered a lot of resentment that day.

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  181. JanetM*

    These are small change compared to the other stories so far, but they both niggle at me.

    Many years ago, I worked for a two-attorney law firm that handled almost exclusively contingency fee cases. One day at staff meeting, the senior partner told us that the staff obviously didn’t care about the clients as much as the lawyers did, because we got paid whether they won cases or not.

    We were all “salaried” and working loads of unpaid overtime, including occasional weekends to come in and do what we called “search and rescue missions” to get client files off their office floors and back into the file cabinets so we could find them when the attorneys wanted them.

    I went upstairs, immediately typed up my resignation letter, and called the temp agency that had originally placed me there to let them know I’d be back in the market for temp jobs in two weeks.

    —–

    Much more recently, in 2009, the public university I work for appointed a new CIO. He announced at the first all-hands division meeting that anyone who’d been working for the same company for five years or more was deadwood and needed to be managed out.

    Oddly, I am still here, approaching year 31. He was fired after a few years – and a considerable number of employee complaints and allegations of fiscal mismanagement. He was fired from his next job just a few years later after similar complaints and allegations.

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  182. Nicky D*

    Several years ago my employer was undergoing a major reorganization of one particular department which was going to result in both layoffs and major changes in job duties for the survivors. This was pre-Zoom times and they arranged an online chat to allow potentially affected employees to ask questions of leadership. An email was sent to employees the day before with a link.

    Leadership decided to have a practice run the day before the chat, which included a role-play exercise. The players (or people acting on their behalf using their names) were a very senior leader of the organization, the leader of the affected department, and a fictitious concerned worker named “Angry_[Job Title]” Unfortunately for them, some employees clicked on the link while the test run was in progress, and took screen shots.

    Among the comments from leadership in the test run: “Life is full of risk. Accept and move on,” in response to a question asking how affected staff could decide whether to accept the early retirement offer without hearing full details of the future of their jobs under the reorganization. The chat also included sentences such as, “We are realigning our resources to ensure blah blah blah,” which were attributed to the leadership.

    My role supported some of the tasks included in the reorganization plan. I received a lecture from the same senior leadership expressing how important it was that I give 110% to the effort because of the anger and low morale in the affected department. My only comment was “well, thanks for laying the groundwork, dude.”

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  183. CzechMate*

    ToxicOldBoss™ loved to complain that my colleagues and I had no business sense and that we were just wasting her money (and we were paid accordingly). Same boss:

    -Drove a Tesla to work,
    -Had an extensive designer wardrobe,
    -Lived in a mansion in a very wealthy part of the city,
    -Constantly updated our work spaces,
    -Was always expanding into other commercial real estate spaces, which were usually empty,
    -Would pay tens of thousands of dollars for us to do frequent Tony Robbins trainings to “unleash our potential.” These would be from 2-5 pm every day when we should have been, you know, actually performing the necessary functions to make the business run,
    -Decided the company should put on a music festival. The work we did was not related to music, performing arts, or community relations (like a chamber of commerce). It also wasn’t a consumer brand like, say, Budweiser, where it would make sense for us to sponsor an event and sell our product. We were an unsexy service provider more akin to tax consulting or insurance sales.

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  184. You want stories, I got stories*

    Many years ago … ok many many years ago. Town hall meetings. Easy over a thousand people there. It was time for the open questions. One of the higher up managers asked, “Who is going to win, Clay Aiken or Ruben Stoddard?” (American Idol Season 2) This was at the height of American Idol popularity. It got some definite noise from the audience. The CEO looked at her and then said, “Who is that?”

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  185. pally*

    I love those years when we get raises.

    The CFO goes on and on about what remodeling she’s gonna do to her home. New bathroom. New kitchen. Marble counters. Fancy sinks. New appliances. Blah, blah, blah.

    The best I could do with my raise was buy a couple of new tires for my truck.

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  186. Feline Meteorologist*

    No specific example, but when my bosses complain about their renters or rental properties, I get super annoyed because they are excess properties they own, and if you hate it so much, sell them!!! Like no one is forcing you to buy up multiple properties. Eye roll.

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  187. Starchy*

    I worked for a small company, (approx 100 people), we never knew if our paycheck was going to bounce. It was so bad, the bank would let us call ahead to see if there was sufficient funds to cash them. In the meantime the owner would hide in his luxury RV parked out back. Then the following Monday tell us stories about how he flew private to watch the game in another state courtside, how many houses he owned etc etc all while our checks bounced. When I pointed out that the discrepancy between the lifestyle and funds to pay us, I was told he was using personal money for his lifestyle and didn’t have enough in company money to pay us regularly. He got busted after we notified DOL that he wasn’t making our 401k payments on time.

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  188. Rey*

    In an evening graduate class meant for older students who were already working full-time, the professor was talking about the new BMW he purchased that day, and that he was disappointed they didn’t have his preferred color. This was on Zoom in the middle of the pandemic, and our class included people who were working full-time in local government roles and non-profits that were directly impacted by the pandemic. He was a tenured professor that was close to retirement, and I think he had been teaching the same course content for at least the last decade without any updates.

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  189. Nightengale*

    It’s not out of touch with finances as much as out of touch with what the organization actually does.

    I am a doctor and work for a giant health care organization. It has an insurance arm and a medical care arm and probably other things. Within the medical care arm are clinical people like doctors and nurses as well as all the non-clinical people that make health care work, from management to facilities to IT to marketing.

    A few months ago we all – ALL – got an e-mail about a required “all employee” meeting in January. This meeting would take place live in multiple settings and virtually. It was scheduled for 8 AM on a specific day. Then it was moved to 8 AM on a different specific day in February.

    Reader, I have patients scheduled. The wait list to see me is nearly a year, so it would have been a big deal to have to move a patient. (This health system also has a requirement that a VP has to authorize a doctor taking time off with less than 6 weeks notice.) Many other practitioners have patients scheduled. The operating rooms across our multiple hospitals probably have surgeries scheduled. The emergency department and intensive care units I am sure will have patients at that time. People who work night shift might be sleeping at that time.

    It was as though it never occurred to the people in charge of this major health system that some of us. .. actually provide patient care. We don’t all have office jobs that consist mainly of taking meetings. I asked my office manager about how mandatory this actually was, and she felt it wouldn’t be all that mandatory so I decided to skip it but worried about missing a “required meeting.” Finally, we got an e-mail telling us they recognized that clinicians may not be able to attend and that the session would be recorded. Good of them to notice!

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  190. Post Morbus*

    In my first corporate job in the early 2000s, it was when Survivor had just started and it had an absolute chokehold on coffee break conversations. EVERYONE watched it.

    Around Christmas we had a major layoff (about 1/3 of the company) and the entire office was full of crying when people were escorted by security to clean out their desks. I remember one woman who lost her job had been recently widowed and was now a single mom to a school-aged child. She was actually banging her head on the wall and screaming right outside of my office. It was absolutely awful and I was fresh out of university so I had no clue what normal was in a layoff situation. I was absolutely gutted.

    After everything died down in the afternoon, the CFO brought us all into a large meeting room and tried to give the requisite speech to assure employees. Instead of empathy, he launched out of the gate with, “I want you to think of it like Survivor – you weren’t voted off the island today!” The room erupted with gasps and looks of horror as he smiled, clearly quite proud of his metaphor. I thought the head of HR was going to die right on the spot!

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  191. Feline Meteorologist*

    Oh! I thought of one. Not a CEO, but I had a former coworker who talked about how she couldn’t afford to retire because of the high property taxes on a farm she owned in another state, and didn’t spend time at. Like…okay?

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  192. MHG*

    I was laid off from my PR agency job. They made my last day of work May 26, but they didn’t tell me until May 27. The reason? The CEO was on vacation. They didn’t pay me for the 27th. I wanted to fight it, but they also gave me extra severance to pay for COBRA because I was still in PT after a knee surgery. I didn’t want to jeopardize that.

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  193. Longwing*

    Back in 2021 we pivoted to remote work. Our CEO realized that with all this newfangled video conferencing stuff, he could get the whole company on one video call where they could listen to him talk. So he set up mandatory twice-weekly all-staff calls.

    He saw himself as something of a comedian/charmer, so he’d reserve the Friday call for being “unfiltered”… Which meant inappropriate jokes, giving upper management dumb nicknames, making fun of staff if they took time off the same week as their birthdays… the list goes on and on.

    As someone in IT, I got roped into “running” the meetings (because they happen on a computer and we’re “good” with computers), forget that there’s nothing remotely technical about them. So I had to be an amateur producer for this unhinged drivel every single week.

    The absolute highlight for me was the day where he was “joking” about his European vacation during the same meeting where he announced an across-the-board 10% pay cut to deal with the shortfalls from Covid.

    He retired at the end of 2024, and I was not sad to see him go… and we still do those moronic calls once a week. Our “project manager” reaches out to different departments to drum up content for them because “We have this meeting, we need something to talk about!”

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  194. average higher ed admin*

    A university I used to work for had a president who had a generally good, pro-environment stance. At a town hall, students pressed him on the university’s investment holdings with companies they argued were destructive to the environment. Rather than addressing the question directly, he retorted, “I walk to work, do you do that? That’s the kind of action that’s good for the environment.”

    Not only was his response weirdly defensive, as the university president, he lived in a university property. Of course he walks to work, his work is right there! And affordable student housing was in the outskirts of town, too far to walk and not close to public transit.

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    1. Donut Explosion*

      I just posted a story about my school’s out-of-touch Dean’s response to the pandemic, but this reminded me of another one!

      Though we went fully remote in Spring 2020, the College decided in Fall 2020 our classes all needed to be based on campus – because classes take place in classrooms. But of course not all of our students would be able to get to campus all the time so we would offer our courses in HyFlex. In this modality, the instructor would be in the classroom, teaching to whichever students would show up to class. The class would be streamed online and students who couldn’t come could log in and participate online.

      If faculty didn’t wish to come to campus, no problem! They could just not teach that semester. No one was forcing them. (Almost all of our faculty were adjuncts, so not teaching meant you didn’t get paid. I think many of the full-time faculty who didn’t feel comfortable coming to campus were assigned the few remaining online course sections)

      But wait, there’s more.

      During a meeting where they discussed logistics of faculty returning to campus, a few faculty expressed concern for their and their students’ safety, because their classes took place at night and they were worried about walking through a mostly-empty campus to get to their cars or to take public transporation home.

      The Dean absolutely scoffed at this, saying that he was on campus all the time and he felt perfectly safe walking from his office to the parking garage.

      A few people tried to point out that he wasn’t there at 10 o’clock at night and asked if they too would receive free parking passes so they could park in the nice, secure garage but he wasn’t particularly interested in hearing from them. They could call campus security to escort them to the edge of campus so they could walk the rest of the way to their car if they didn’t feel safe.

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  195. Raine*

    When I worked at a grocery store, management would incentivize the staff with promises of free pizza. And it would work! Goals would be met, pizza would be had.

    Pizza that we, the hot foods employees, would have to make.
    All.
    Day.
    Long.

    I’ve never been so de-incentivized to meet goals.

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  196. Donut Explosion*

    In Spring 2020 I worked in higher education in a faculty support role. Anyone who worked in higher ed during this time knows what a huge struggle it was. My area in particular worked harder than ever helping faculty move their courses online (previously almost everything was in-person), and lots of other areas had to figure out how to move their processes online. And then once we got through the emergency remote instruction phase, leadership made a bunch of weird decisions on how to move forward (namely, that rather than primarily continuing with online instruction we were all going to adopt HyFlex, which required another round of training and course redesign). I left in Spring 2021 for mostly unrelated reasons, and though many classes were on campus most of the rest of the college operations were remote – because we had all figured out how to work remotely.

    A few months after I left college leadership decided they wanted everyone back on campus full-time, and held a large Town Hall to share the decision, announcing to the College community that it was “time to get back to work”. My former colleagues, who had been busting their butts from home for the past 18 months were, to say the least, not impressed by this.

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  197. RussianInTexas*

    A division VP in my old job had a meeting with my department once. That department was the only one in the company still hourly, with some people making minimum wage or close to it. He whole spiel was how the company needs to create the “elevator pitch”, and how each one of us needs to create a personal “elevator pitch”, and how we should provide the excellent customer service like her Lexus’s dealership does.

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  198. hypoglycemic rage (she/her)*

    I was working super part-time at a local public library. the assistant director/head of HR got some special permission to work entirely (either totally or a significant majority more than others, can’t remember) from home for several months during the worst of COVID and for several months after. meanwhile the rest of us, even part timers, were still coming in a couple days a week. and most of us were front-desk people, helping the public. (at this library, management did not typically work the public desks, which was a whole other problem for me.)

    one of her first days back, she comes out to the adult services area and faces me and says something to the effect of “wow it’s been so long since i’ve been here.”

    it just seemed so out of touch with what most of us had been going through for the last several months, working with the public and that involved a lot of changing policies that said public did not always like or appreciate.

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  199. NotAnEconomist*

    During the summer of 2020, the chief Human Resources officer at the elite college where I worked explained in a tense all faculty/staff meeting that we shouldn’t be upset that they were making changes to our retirement matching program (they were suspending it) because the institution had our best interests at heart — and because as a majority female staff/faculty we didn’t have a great grasp on finances anyway. Note: the chief HR officer was a woman. Either the execs weren’t wildly out of touch, or my lady brain (which would have been frustrated but understanding of the reality that pandemic-related restrictions were having a negative impact on the institution’s financials) was just too lady-brained to actually understand that I’m bad with money.

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  200. Mascot Madness*

    It was sometime after COVID when morale was terrible. We had these occasional virtual all-hands meetings led by an incredibly out-of-touch member of leadership. He genuinely, 100% earnestly, stated that his proposal to improve morale was to establish a company mascot.

    We were notoriously underpaid, overworked, and leadership had not been listening to the many good, meaningful changes being proposed. This was mocked for years (and is still mocked by those of us who were around for it)

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  201. anytime anywhere*

    A new university president planning a week of inauguration activities right after the university is placed on fiscal watch by the state and a RIF where 13 or so faculty and staff lost their jobs. Yes, they did eventually scale back the inauguration events, but not until a few weeks prior. Wondering who had (appropriately) raised a stink about that one…

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  202. Higher Ed Kitten Party*

    My coworker and I were talking to our immediate boss about how rough the housing market is in our town. We were specifically talking about how each of us only has secure, affordable housing because of dumb luck. Our director chimed in to say, “yes, I totally understand! When both of my sons graduated high school and move out, I had to downsize my home. I even had to have one of the extra walk in closets converted into an office. The renovations took forever!”

    Buddy. That is not the same.

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  203. Anonymous University Employee*

    The provost at the University where I work had a listening session I attended, ostensibly to hear the concerns of faculty and staff, including challenges to tenure and low pay and morale. Instead he spent his 10 minutes explaining to us how to set up direct donations in our 401ks to the university. I really hope someone told him off later (someone with tenure).

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  204. SleeplessDad*

    A company I used to work at did not offer parental leave. So when my wife got pregnant, I began saving up PTO to use after the birth. I also asked my manager if I could work from home temporarily after coming back from PTO. This was somewhat uncharted territory for the small company (it shouldn’t have been post-COVID, but anyway…), so the request went up to his boss, the president. The president had a meeting with me to discuss how it would work.

    He seemed very nice about trying to accommodate, but also quite clueless. When discussing the return-to-office timeline, he said things like, “So after a week or two when the baby’s sleeping through the night, and you start thinking, ‘Man, I really want to go back to work!’…” Yes, he does have children of his own!

    I could go on about that grandboss and his sometimes quirky, sometimes toxic behavior, but that stands out as the most out-of-touch thing I remember him saying. Thankfully I’m now at a company that has paid parental leave, a strong hybrid/WFH culture, and a healthier work environment overall.

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  205. Bird Lady*

    While working for a local nonprofit, we had a leadership change right after Covid. Our former ED was local, and while economically well-off, was a fiscally responsible woman who when I joined the team was driving a 20-year old Toyota. She wore high-quality clothing but nothing overtly designer and all quite tasteful.

    Due to Covid-related loss of revenue, our team was overworked and underpaid. As people left for other opportunities, responsibilities were passed along to remaining staff rather than hiring replacements.

    Our new ED came to our first in-person gala, where we were honest about the pandemic’s affect on our finances, in a couture gown, brand new Gucci belt, and $1,000 shoes. She regularly wore brand-new designer clothing and balked at people who shopped at Old Navy. At the gala, she told donors that she didn’t need to work because she was rich, but she wanted to work to keep busy. She was making twice what the former ED was making, and at least 10-times more than our highest paid staff member.

    She once complimented me on my jeans, and when I said that they were from the Gap (and they were really nice jeans!), she said she didn’t respect anyone’s taste if they wore cheap jeans. I was her sole development person at the time, responsible for all our fundraising events.

    I very quickly quit.

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  206. MHG*

    Just remembered that I have another! And I’m naming names as I’ve told this story many times when discussing this man’s out-of-touchness. I interned for the Chicago Bulls in sales in 2001. We were paid $25 per season ticket we sold. If you know anything about the Bulls then, the times were bad and I got yelled at a lot when I tried to sell tickets. We dressed professionally and women were supposed to wear “proper hosiery.” It was July in Chicago, so most women ignored that rule.

    The one good thing about the job was they catered lunch for us. One day in the lunch room, Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls (and White Sox) owner was there. The next day, all the women were given memos to remind them to wear proper hosiery.

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  207. Alice Quinn*

    My favorite moment was when an SVP took my team out to lunch to celebrate a successful launch of a major project – a really nice thing to do! He happened to be seated at my table, and proceeded to go on and on about his plans to purchase a plane since he’d completed his pilot’s license. No one at the table was making anywhere near a plane-purchasing salary. When one of my friends called him on it, his response was, “It’s just like having a second mortgage, so it’s not that bad!” Sir, none of us have second mortgage money either.

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  208. Grey Coder*

    CEO of a tech startup was a nepo baby whose family had invested in the company. CEO was American but the company was based in the UK. Came the day when layoffs/redundancies were planned, CEO was baffled by the idea that he had to follow UK employment laws. “Can’t we just fire them?” were his actual words.

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  209. Amari*

    My boss’s boss was always bragging about her huge house, multiple cars, expensive purses, expensive shoes, etc. etc. I was an underpaid entry level employee who was being held back from a deserved promotion. Eventually one day when she started talking about the size of her garage I blurted out incredulously, without really meaning to, “That’s bigger than the size of my entire apartment!!!!” I think maybe she toned it down after that.

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  210. AndersonDarling*

    At my last company, the CEO was holding an “all hands” meeting about how we all needed to step up, sacrifice for the company, do more work, take more responsibility… and then asked “Do you need to take a pee-pee break?” He was speaking to everyone and legitimately was wondering if it was time to pause the meeting for a few minutes.
    That was some astounding compartmentalization. We needed to step up and save his company, but our perceived social and language skills were still on the “pee-pee” and “poo-poo” level.

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  211. Long Time Lurker*

    Years ago I worked at a non profit where most of the staff was very poorly paid and we were either part-timers or “contractors” which meant we didn’t get any benefits, including any paid time off (not to mention health insurance, etc). The director, however, worked full time, had benefits, and took ample time off, in part because her husband regularly traveled to Europe for his work and so she would go with him, often for weeks at a time.

    One of my colleagues had always wanted to travel to a country our boss went to frequently and his grandmother had given him the money for a trip as a special present. He knew he’d have to take a week off (unpaid) but he was so excited.

    Until our boss said “there’s no point in going to Europe unless you go for at least two weeks, honestly, I think three weeks is the bare minimum.”

    She knew exactly how much he made and the fact that he didn’t get any PTO.

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  212. JoAnna*

    We had a town hall meeting in November where all the execs talked about how successful the company was and how much money it had made. Also they’d just spent $$$ renovating our offices even though most staff are remote or hybrid.

    When it came time for Christmas bonuses, mine was… $125. That’s .25% of my gross salary.

    Also they talk big about being supportive of mental health but we only get five paid sick days per YEAR – and the only reason we have that is due to state law.

    Allegedly I’m eligible for a merit raise later this year but I’m sure that will be some pathetic amount as well.

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  213. Oogie*

    I worked at a regional bank and every branch was required to have a meeting to gather around and watch a video of the CEO informing us no one would be getting raises because the bank *only* profited 20 million last year.

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  214. gotta be anon*

    This month, the HR at my large public university sent out a survey to all full time staff, asking us which of our benefits we wanted to keep (that’s not how they worded it, of course; it was a “Total Rewards Survey: Share feedback on pay, benefits, education and more”). The survey questions were in the vein of: rank in order of importance to you: your pay, your retirement, your health insurance. This was a huge series of questions for all of our benefits, including tuition reimbursement, dental insurance, vision insurance, adoption assistance, flexible work, etc. Making us rank what we would be willing to give up in benefits. Reprehensible, right?

    The real kicker was one of the last questions, which was basically: would you be willing to pay more for your health insurance if you got off the days between Christmas and New Year’s without having to use vacation?

    Morally despicable from a place where the university coaching staff and administration are the highest paid public employees in the state, but the rank and file are woefully underpaid and our benefits aren’t anywhere as good as they used to be.

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  215. Knows a teacher*

    Someone I know who is a teacher has a coworker who has been having a custody battle with their ex spouse. They had to miss a lot of days due to court dates and come in late when the ex is late to exchange the kids.

    Then one day when it’s almost the time of the week for them to get the kids back, they find out the ex has taken the kids 7 states over and is on their way to the border. Of course they took some time off to take care of that. The superintendent went to deny the leave request with “you should’ve planned better” even though they had the sick time. As if every absence can be planned for.

    I don’t know if the leave dispute has been resolved yet, but I do know the union got involved. And they did get the kids back, along with full custody.

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  216. Anonymous and Bitter*

    I’m sure all of this is cluelessness rather than malice, of course, since when is a highly-paid corporate executive ever a narcissist/psychopath who enjoys lording their wealth and position over their peasants… er… employees?

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  217. Random Bystander*

    It’s been a very, very long time but … oh, so very out of touch.

    I was working retail (30+ years ago), and to “save costs” they decided to lay off all the part time employees (including the ones who restocked basic items like packaged socks, underwear, diapers, etc). Further, they reduced all of us full-time employees to 32 hours/week. So we were feeling the pinch, especially since the hours the store was open were not reduced. That’s when corporate announced that in order to keep the CEO’s pay “equivalent to [other CEOs]” that they were *doubling* his pay and *tripling* his bonus. I mean, the increase was in dollars well into the six figures.

    Perhaps it is not a surprise that the particular store (entire chain) is no longer in business.

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  218. Bruce*

    Not my story, but when my son attended SJSU the President was squeezing the instructors and increasing class sizes to save money. Then he made a sweet-heart deal with a big tech company to spend $28 mega-bucks on a dedicated video phone system… This was in the early 2010s when Skype was already in wide use! He was not widely missed when he moved on.

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  219. Beauty and Roast Beef*

    After our nonprofit’s main funding source cut our funding by nearly 50%, we had a lot of staff layoffs and department reorgs. I sat near the HR team and saw a lot of closed-door meetings (complete with a white noise machine) so I kind of suspected it was coming. It was stressful and tense – they gave people about a month’s notice and they had to continue working to be able to get their full severance, vacation payouts, etc. Soon after, maybe about a week after the layoff announcement, I overheard our CEO pop into one of the HR manager’s offices and ask, without closing the door and in full earshot of anyone around, if his quarterly bonus would be included in that week’s payroll. Like dude, READ THE ROOM.

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  220. Anon for This*

    I worked for a private non-profit university several years ago that was having financial difficulties. I found a new job elsewhere but still had quite a few friends working there. They had their big fundraising event on Friday night, where many employees generously donated to the cause. On Saturday morning they announced that the university was closing permanently and everyone’s jobs would end within the month. They kept all the donations, of course. I am pleased to note that they were the subject of multiple lawsuits, although no one got the jail time I felt they deserved.

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  221. cncx*

    Ok, this was not in the us and us rules don’t apply, but our hr person made a payroll mistake when our pension plans switched and as a result all of us had to pay back into our mandatory pension between what was the equivalent of a month’s salary. Again, not the us, normally this amount is withhold from our salary but strangely our salaries didn’t change, hr sucked there for that (new pension was obviously a worse deal and this was maybe not a payroll error but the price of switching and or hr’s incompetence passed on to us) and other reasons. They were like, we can garnish your entire wage this month (legal in that jurisdiction) or we can spread it out over two or three months. I chose to have one third of my salary garnished for three months.

    I was going through a very expensive divorce and I could not go without a month’s salary. I couldn’t really go without the money they wanted to take in the payment plan. I didn’t have it in the bank because I was throwing every last cent at my ex husband’s tax debt ( another peculiarity of that jurisdiction). Although my salary was good, I still was the second lowest paid employee.

    Did not enjoy being looked at like I was an alien from planet wtf for not having it in the bank, and skipping all socializing and people being like “but we pay you good money”…yeah it is good money if you aren’t paying for the company’s pension “mistakes” and the price of your freedom from your marriage. I had a lot of peanut butter sandwiches those three months. The people acting like this was me not managing my money when actually I was doing an amazing job managing my money given what I had to pay in my divorce still leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

    The kicker is in this jurisdiction usually there is a legal framework for the company to eat these kinds of mistakes that were their fault, and maybe they did for the executives but they didn’t for us peons. The expensive summer party would have more than paid the pension mistakes for me and the other two poors.

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  222. Justin*

    At my current job they really do pay us well enough (entry pay is 70k depending on location) that this is much less of an issue. Amusingly, this means that we both are paid better and the top execs are more conscious of it.

    A few jobs ago I was making 40k (in nyc) and I was in a cab with my boss and her boss, and all they were talking about was what trip they were taking over the long weekend and then they asked me, and I said, well I will be here working. (I worked Saturdays.)

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  223. ragazza*

    Worked at a company where the CEO would park his shiny red sports car diagonally across the spots for disabled people. Right in front of the entrance of course. Not a good look.

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    2. juliebulie*

      You’re not kidding. I thought some of these stories would be difficult, and no surprise, they are. Sometimes I wish people could hear themselves.

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  225. Always Tired*

    Our CEO rambles about how HE manages his ADHD just fine without medication, so he doesn’t get why others need it or perhaps accommodations. Meanwhile, he (1) has a multi-generational home with his retired in-laws taking care of most child related tasks, (2) weekly housekeeping and gardeners, (3) always has food delivered and never does his own grocery shopping (4) pays for laundry service, and (5) never looks at his calendars or follows up on emails, just relies on employees to tell him/remind him. HE does not managed his ADHD. everyone around him does, and he doesn’t even realize it.

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  226. Lady Ann*

    This isn’t as egregious as some of the others, but when I was a brand new professional a few months into my job, my car broke down. I had a job where I traveled from place to place during the workday, so I couldn’t just get a ride to work and home. It was a real inconvenience for me. My VP at the time heard me complaining to a coworker and interrupted to say “What’s the big deal? You just bring it to the dealership and they’ll fix it for you.” Reader, it cost almost $4000 to fix the car, which was in fact my entire savings at the time.

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  227. anonymous here*

    Just before lockdown during the pandemic:

    It was clear to everyone in our office that this epidemic was very very bad, that the disease was very serious, and that we were going to be going into lockdown– that students would not be coming back to campus after spring break.

    We lock the door to our department (most students aren’t even on campus, because spring break, but there are some). We agree as a department that we will use email and phone, zoom if we know how.

    Our dean’s office orders us to unlock the doors and to see any student, parent, visitor, whomever that comes to the office. Immediately.

    We were horrified and enraged. Even pretty stoic folks were weeping. The message was clear: Pretending that everything is ok and not upsetting students and parents is more important than our lives. They didn’t care if we DIED.

    And of course, most of the people in the dean’s office were either working from home, or in an office suite that had always been locked.

    A couple days later, the university shut down and we all started working at home. But the damage was done. They showed us who they were.

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    1. dulcinea47*

      I’ve worked for a university for many years (not during the pandemic tho). The number of times they don’t care if we died is a lot higher than zero.

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      1. ICodeForFood*

        I had one job where I always said (out loud, to my coworkers) “It’s a good thing there are laws against lining us up and shooting us, because if they (management) could make a buck doing so, they’d shoot us without even thinking about it.” (Yes, I was a cynic even when I was younger.)

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  228. UpstateNewYork*

    I once worked for a smaller business that had a big Christmas party every year. It was understood that everyone (about 40 of us, all skilled technicians) would receive their Christmas bonus at that party – the owners liked to make a big deal of handing out checks in envelopes to everyone. This was the late 1990s and Christmas bonuses were still “a thing” at many companies, and were often quite substantial; the bonus could be as much as an extra month’s pay. Obviously these were highly anticipated, and often depended upon for Christmas gifts, etc.

    The last year I attended, we all knew business was going to take a downturn; the big corp that we were doing contract work for was finally training their own folks (who we had been working with side-by-side) to do the tasks we’d been contracted to do for them. Obviously our services would no longer be needed.

    The owners seemed oblivious to this, and moved around the room during dinner to make small talk with us. One showed us pictures of his new Corvette that he made sure we all knew he paid cash for. Another owner took a ton of pictures with his new $5000 digital camera – he also made sure we knew that. The other owners (there were actually five) talked us all up about what a banner year the company had, passing $5m in sales for the first time.

    The time finally came, after dinner, for the speeches and ceremonial distribution of Christmas bonuses. After all five owners stood up, one after the other, and said some words about our record income this past year, one owner moved around the room with a cardboard box, which was full of knit hats bearing the company logo, and gave us each one, while another took copious pictures with his incredibly-expensive new digital camera.

    We all waited in near-silence after he was done for the actual bonus. Spoiler: the hats were our bonus. The disbelief quickly changed to bitterness, and no one hung around the party after that.

    More than half of us found new positions at other companies before the end of January.

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  229. Oniya*

    So, I work retail. In fact, my spouse and I work for the same place. Not long ago, they switched to using an authentication program that required you to scan a QR code in order to register your device so you could change your password.

    Here’s the thing: We have one (1) cell phone between us. My ‘contact number’ is a land-line. I have joked that my phone is too dumb to be let out of the house on its own. My spouse’s phone – which still had more functions than necessary and was in perfectly decent shape – couldn’t *run* the authenticator app. My daughter’s phone could run the app, and read QR codes, but she was *not* an employee, didn’t want the app on her phone, and I couldn’t rely on her being available any time I needed to change my password (nor should I expect her to, since she has her own life and job!)

    We ended up shelling out for a new model for my spouse, but there was no way we could afford a second cell and service package.

    While we were trying to explain this to the store manager, one of the assistant managers said that she ‘changes phones more often than she changes her car’. You would think this is normal – but friends, she hasn’t held on to a single car for more than a year.

    (We did eventually figure out a solution that involved the *fleeting* use of my daughter’s phone, and a rigorous schedule of updating my password on an in-store computer well before it expires.)

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  230. Matt*

    Back at the height of covid, all travel was suspended company-wide, except of course the executives who had an off-site in Hawaii to discuss strategy. They even distributed a video of all the progress they made discussing strategy while beautiful palm trees swayed in the background and they wore leis and Hawaiian shirts.

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  231. Shhhhh I Just Watch the Chaos*

    Most recently, completely tone-deaf CFO who refused to provide $75/$100 gift cards to a team working on an impossible project with an impossible deadline (they really each deserved bonuses of at least $1K-$2K) because $500 worth of gift cards was “too much”. This is a multi-billion $$ company. Two weeks later, she hosted her entire leadership team with their +1 (40-60+ total) to a holiday dinner at a fancy restaurant…. several got food poisoning. She is also rejecting any expenses related to any team-building meals of any type while leadership had a summit over two days including meals, happy hours, complimentary leadership books. The list goes on and on….

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  232. Am I hearing this right?*

    Overcoming Hardship on a Yacht
    During COVID, our Founder/CEO set up weekly Friday-afternoon video calls “to keep us connected.” I would have rather been able to leave early on Friday afternoons, but whatever. Several of these included retired Navy Seals and other Combat Veterans with really graphic stories, somehow relating war to our IT business? Weird enough, but the last one I attended came when our COO told us all to expect a “Special Guest.” He launched into his hobbies of collecting classic sports cars and boating, leading into his special guest our CEO who had a tale of overcoming adversity. That Adversity? He crewed his friend’s yacht to the Caribbean in a storm. He didn’t get to sleep the whole night before they ended up on their week’s vacation.

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  233. FionasHuman*

    In the 90’s I worked for a mercifully brief time in a bank’s call center. The bank had a company newsletter, and in one memorable issue one article talked about the fact that, due to staff cutbacks, many remaining people were picking up so many hours that they were using the company’s Employee Assistance counseling to deal with the stress. Just a page away, another piece talked about how great it supposedly was that all the executives were getting huge bonuses and the company’s stock price had shot up!

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  234. ITWife*

    My partner’s CEO/boss asked him to help his son (not an employee) set up wifi in his house. We live in New York City where everything is cramped. He described the son’s house as “a small home, just two floors, the attic, and basement.” We now use the shorthand “it’s a small home” to refer to out-of-touch rich people.

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  235. MsMaryMary*

    At an all-hands lunch, the CEO complained about spending the afternoon on his friend’s yacht. He found it boring and was upset they sailed out of cell phone range.

    At a different all-hands meeting, the COO opened the presentation with pictures of his recent trip to Japan. He raved about his experience and said there was no excuse for everyone not to travel to Japan.

    Same company: an exec VP talked for months about his new in ground salt water pool and mentioned the cost many times. It was more than several people he managed made in a year.

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  236. Coverage Associate*

    I once worked for a firm where the main office was in Los Angeles, but my branch office, which wasn’t tiny, was in San Francisco. Los Angeles used to lecture everyone about how there was “no excuse” for not entering our time each evening. This was before WFH.

    Maybe an executive with a stay at home spouse never had to leave immediately because of a family emergency, never got suddenly ill. But I also thought a lot of it was car v public transportation. I know a difference of 10 minutes in a car commute can mean more than 10 minutes delay in getting to your destination, but it’s nothing like how staying an extra 5 minutes can mean you have to wait an hour for the next train or bus.

    My next firm acknowledged that even salaried people didn’t have totally flexible commutes.

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  237. AnonyMoose*

    I’m sure there will be far worse ones here, but right after telling us we wouldn’t be getting a holiday/end if year bonus (when we’ve gotten one for enough years it’s become a norm), we undertook a big office renovation. The new space is nice, but I’d rather have a bonus!

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  238. Sparkles McFadden*

    Thanks to union rules, we always had advance notice with a specific date regarding when layoff announcements would take place, and generally what the layoffs would entail. Some very bad managers would try to make light of things during the stressful interim period between the general announcement and the specific announcement regarding who would be losingtheir jobs.

    – One manager had a dart board and marked it up with “Keep job” and “Get let go” and challenged people to “throw a dart to help him decide.”

    – Another put up a sign over his mini-basketball hoop that said “Make three baskets and keep your job.”

    – The worst was one I didn’t witness but heard about from several sources. Before the manager started announcing who, specifically, would be let go, she started singing “Will you stay or will you go?” to the tune of the The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

    Suffice it to say, that we had actual parties when these people got the axe.

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    1. CeeDoo*

      I don’t have enough control over my facial muscles to be in a room with that level of jackholery. I don’t just have resting b*tch face, I have “resting serial killer face.”

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  239. So anon for this one*

    A family member had an IT job with a health-service-related employer that made out like an absolute bandit during the pandemic. Like to the extent of booking billions – not millions, BILLIONS – of dollars in revenue as a result of gouging for the services they provided.

    When the company landed their biggest contract, the software they needed to fulfill it literally did not yet exist. The IT department, many of whom had not had raises in several years and who were working from their tiny studio apartments during the pandemic, was all-hands-on-deck for twelve hours a day for close to two months. They somehow pulled together a finished product that normally would have taken multiple years to complete, thus ensuring more BILLIONS in revenue for the C-suite.

    And what do you think the CEO did for all those hard-working IT folks who had put in punishing hours of remote work to produce that revenue? Why, he sent each one of them a little handbell, the kind that a 19th-century teacher might have had on her desk to call class to order, with a note saying “ring this bell to celebrate our success!”

    My family member left for a much better job a few months later, along with most of the rest of the IT department. Over a year later, the family member was still getting “PLEEEEASE come back, name your price, we’ll pay you ANYTHING to come back” emails from their former employer.

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  240. The Data Diva*

    Oooh, I have something for this! At my old job, they drastically changed the health plan coverage right before open enrollment and the cost of having a baby jumped from about $250 to $5000. Staff were INCENSED, as obviously those who were already pregnant were suddenly facing a 1900% increase in co-pay costs. My VP’s wife was pregnant so he was going around to all the customer service representatives trying to commiserate about how it was going to be so expensive and he was going to have to pay it too. I finally pointed out that $5000 was literally 2% of his annual salary, but was over 10% of the customer service reps salary. For ONE co-pay. He shut up about it pretty soon after that.

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  241. ParkingisnotaRight*

    While I was working for a large university in the transit department we had to transition the entire campus to a new, digital parking system. In the middle of covid. My team was front-line customer service and we had been working for over a year on this transition to ensure it would go as smoothly as possible for the end users and accommodate the huge range of parking needs for all the different workers/ students/ visitors to campus. Leadership decided we all had to attend a virtual celebration party the day after the launch- we had to shut down our phones and everything for the meeting. Our managers’ pushback about timing and customer impact was shot down.

    The entire hour our team had to listen as every other group, except the field team (the only other customer-facing group), was thanked over and over again by every member of leadership for all the hard work they did- including attributing work we did to other groups. Only our manager lauded the months of work done by us and the field team, and our director tried to cut her off.

    Our reward was dealing with all the voice messages customers left about us being unavailable during posted office hours.

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  242. Moved on to better things but still pissed by this one*

    I worked for a department where about 2/3rds of our department was seasonal, employed March 1 – November 30. Three weeks into March 2020, the VP wept as she announced that all of the seasonal staff was being let go, and that she and her very wealthy husband would personally pay for two weeks of severance, since the organization typically didn’t provide that to seasonal staff. She then asked the seasonal staff to leave, gather their things, etc. while she met with the full-time staff. We all raised our eyebrows and rolled our eyes at each other when one seasonal person stayed. Who just so happened to be returning seasonal staff, and a favorite friend of the VP. At the meeting with full-time staff +1, no explanation was given as to why one seasonal person apparently still had a job, but the VP dried her tears, and said while this was a terrible time for the organization she could assure everyone in the room that our jobs were safe.
    Two weeks later half of the full time staff was let go, including me, over the phone by HR, with no severance but vacation payout. AFTER we had all been encouraged to use our vacation days as much as possible in those two weeks while the organization figured out how to handle covid and WFH. Guess the VP learned a lot about how to handle layoffs in those two weeks.
    (Oh and her seasonal friend stayed on all through covid, was promoted into one of the laid-off positions in early 2021, and then got a giant promotion to the senior leadership team in early 2022).

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  243. iglwif*

    Early in the pandemic, the new VP (located in Europe) of my newly created division at a former job got on a massive Teams meeting to introduce himself and our Big New Project.

    He talked sympathetically about how hard the pandemic and sudden wfh was for so many people … and then said his family really missed being able to go to their second home in Singapore.

    This was not well received by those wfh in tiny apartments alongside their partners, flatmates, parents, kids, etc.

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  244. ICodeForFood*

    Decades ago I worked at an insurance company. The CEO (or maybe he was the company president… It’s been too long) was approaching retirement, and he “put the company in play” to be acquired, which greatly improved HIS finances, but put the rest of us at risk of losing our jobs.
    He was then surprised to discover no one really wanted to chit-chat with him anymore when he wandered the halls to talk with the rank and file employees.

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  245. MuseumChick*

    Not as bad as a lot of these but it was still very out of touch. I worked a terrible commission based sales job for less than year right out of college. The boss was the definition of a JerkFace including, instead of firing employees just bullying them until they quit. Every quarter there would be a prize for whoever had the best sales numbers. Its been to long for me to recall specific examples but I think it was often a gift card or something like that. Well, one day he decided that the prize for the next person would be…..getting to use the JerkFace’s Jaguar for a month. Yup, you would get to drive around in your bosses pretentious car for exactly 30 days.

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  246. DC Native*

    I worked at a non-profit in Washington, DC, where my boss was married to someone who was quite wealthy. She didn’t have to work. She did because she was committed to the cause our non-profit supported. Anyhow, our office was down the street from a now defunct, very exclusive, and very pricy store called Rizik Brothers. She used to go on shopping sprees there at lunch and come back to the office laden with garment bags. It was very tone deaf for the organization. I’m not sure any of the rest of use could have afforded to even walk in the store, let alone buy anything there.

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    1. Sharkie*

      Oh Rizik Brothers. That store was a trip. I grew up in the DC suburbs and a friend’s cousin got into a huge fight with her grandmarie because she didn’t see a point getting a wedding dress there. The grandmother had a fit because “You can’t be seen in a dress not from there on your wedding day! I don’t want my friends to think we are poor!!”. The Bride’s dress was from another salon and was so pretty, but it wasn’t tens of thousands of dollars so it must be trash!

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  247. slr*

    The startup I used to work at went on hiring blitz, expanding from 50 employees to 300+ in the seven years I worked there. I noticed they were hiring lots of young women, like me, and asked the CEO if he would consider adding parental-leave top-up. (We’re in Canada, it’s a pretty common benefit for professional jobs). Our office had every perk you could think of: free snacks, a gym, golf simulator, a bar the size of a conference room! But maternity leave top-up was a bridge too far apparently. He said that people should just go quit and work for a bank if they wanted paid maternity leave.

    So I quit, went to work for another company, and enjoyed a paid maternity leave.

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  248. Geoff K*

    My company ran events all over the US that were each attended by hundreds of people of paying attendees. One day, the owner published an article on our website (which was read by thousands.) In it he talked about how he’d been struggling with the fact that the current model of running these events was unsustainable, how his employees had been trying for months trying to figure out solutions, and concluded with how he’d been at lunch one day and in a flash of insight wrote down the answer on the back of a napkin.

    The main problems with this were:
    1. It was shocking to all the attendees and nearly all of the employees to hear that there were apparently massive problems with the business. People started to panic about the company possibly going under. This was exacerbated by…
    2. He didn’t explain what the problems were or what his brilliant napkin-based solution was. The article gave no details whatsoever and seemed less intended to inform than it did to paint him as a visionary genius. This contributed to…
    3. Staff who worked hard on the planning and logistics of these events felt the article completely disregarded their contributions. It made them come across as a bunch of incompetents who needed the owner to swoop in with his napkin to save them.

    The owner later insisted that everybody had misinterpreted what he wrote, but he refused to elaborate any further on the grounds that he couldn’t release “proprietary business information”.

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  249. SameShizDifferentDay*

    We recently had a big Teams call with several thousand staff to welcome a new big boss. New Boss joins from his home office, which is located in place where we don’t operate, so normal employees are not approved to work from that state. On the wall behind him hang several very, very expensive musical instruments. He has a digital picture frame that displays the live stock ticker for his old company.

    New Boss attempts to connect by mentioning that he just returned from a family trip overseas. He wishes they could have gone sooner, but gosh it’s so expensive to take a family abroad! Dude’s salary is a cool $5 million annually. He’s just a regular guy though, just like us.

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  250. The Leanansidhe*

    The boss who invited us to a holiday party at his home, in a year where budgets were cut and our raises were frozen. It had a two story library, three garages (six cars), and a chandelier in every room. Food was good though.

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  251. PR Princess*

    A more heartwarming story: A senior administrator at the college I worked at had no clue how PR worked but wanted to be supportive of my role. I set up Google Alerts for her since she needed to keep tabs on VIP alumni and college news. The next day she was thrilled to see an article about our college come through on the alerts, so she forwarded it to all the college leadership, cc’d me, and bragged that I had gotten us picked up by Google! It was a link to our own college news page that I had posted. Nevertheless, the congratulations poured in.

    I tried to explain that it was just alerting her to new results associated with the keyword search, but it never did click. She continued to insist that I sent things out through Google Alerts throughout our time working together, and college leadership thought I was awesome at my job.

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  252. ProducerNYC*

    I was working in local TV news in the mid-1990s for a Station owned by AH Belo. The interim news Director (flown in from another state) was loudly and excitedly talking about how he was going to use his end of year bonus to buy a new Porsche. It got very quiet in the newsroom as we were going through layoffs. If I remember correctly, that year the bonus for us regular folks was a frozen turkey. (That frozen turkey bonus might’ve been the next year, but either way it wasn’t great)

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  253. Nat20*

    I worked front desk at a big chain hotel 2020-2021, so early Covid era. Obviously not many people traveling so there was not much business. Early 2021 we had an all-staff meeting led by my boss’s boss, a higher-up in the local hospitality company that managed this location. She told everyone how we had only just barely made it through Q4 of 2020, so Q1 of 2021 was going to be crucial. But guess what! The handful of executives at Management Co had taken *smaller holiday bonuses* — not NO bonuses, just smaller ones — so that the hotel could stay open. She reeeally emphasized this, like, can you believe that?!? How generous!!!

    Those of us underlings in front desk, housekeeping, and maintenance who had been living through hell for $10/hour and never got so much as a high five as a bonus just stared at her. Yeah, how generous of you. She was oblivious.

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  254. academic admin*

    I will never forget the two tenured professors complaining about how everyone who earned over $x at our university had their salaries frozen for a year during covid lockdown so that the lower-paid staff could receive a cost-of-living increase…while I, their underpaid program coordinator, was standing right there.

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  255. Annie2*

    This is probably a pretty familiar example, but I was working at a law firm during the early pandemic. All of us peons (staff and associates) were in our tiny apartments either single or with significant others also trying to do their full-time jobs from home. All of the partners were in their huge homes with home offices and stay-at-home wives handling the domestic labour. One of the partners sent a “productivity email” out to the whole firm in June 2020, specifically calling out associates with lower billables. Hm, maybe my hours are low because I’m literally working from the bathroom floor because it’s the only room with a door in my studio apartment? Meanwhile you’re sending this email from your fully kitted-out home office in your architecturally significant home while your wife makes your dinner…

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  256. Karma is the Guy on the Chiefs*

    My boss completed our annual reviews, in which he told us that due to uncertainties in the parent company (we work for his company, which is in turn employed by national company), that we would only be getting $0.50 an hour raises. He then purchased two vehicles in cash for himself and his wife, and made sure to brag about how he was paying to send his son to college, along with his own bachelor’s degree. He also introduced new annual goals, which if (when) we met, the parent company would send him on his bucket list trip…to Europe.

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  257. Not There Anymore*

    When initial stay-at-home orders were issued in March of 2020, the owner of the small company I was at called an all-hands to discuss how we’d be moving to remote work for the next couple weeks (ha!). She then spent a lot of the meeting complaining that she’d have to–gasp–do laundry, cooking, and cleaning herself, which apparently she’d had her house manager doing for years.

    That same owner then cut all staff salaries by 10% over the summer. From the remote beach house she rented for the season in an expensive nearby vacation area (think the Hamptons).

    She was shocked that by the end of the year we’d reached about 70% staff turnover.

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  258. Not a Girl Boss*

    I formerly worked for a very large and well known company that “furloughed” its employees a few days a month during COVID and cut all of our salaries 10%. The CEO used a town hall to brag all about how he took the 10% pay cut too… off his base salary. It was maximum self-congratulatory “I’m a man of the people” energy. He also complained about how hard it was to work from home with “non-ideal office setups”… from his gigantic mahogany office overlooking a body of water.

    Someone did the math, and if he had simply not taken a bonus that year, that alone would have covered every single employee’s 10% salary cut.

    We had a Q&A submission page for town hall, and the top 3 ranked questions were variations of “If you care so much about being in the trenches with us, why didn’t you take a smaller bonus?” – for the next two straight years of monthly town halls. He never did answer that question.

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  259. CanuckAnon*

    We had a new C-suite exec join a few years ago. We’d gone through company-wide layoffs the year before, and were still in recovery mode. Most of us were doing more with less, short-staffed, and generally felt overworked and underpaid.

    She opened a department call inviting small talk about your weekend summer plans – and shared that she herself had just had a lovely time at the executive retreat at our CEO’s cottage, and how awesome the views from the private float-plane flight there from our HQ city had been. Any time someone mentioned going to a cottage for the rest of the summer someone would respond “but are you taking a float plane?”.

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  260. Jklsemi*

    A few jobs ago, I attended an off-site, all-afternoon, all-hands meeting that was *supposed* to be annual updates and plans from our various units. The meeting was already running long (which meant that many of us would end up having to pay extra for parking) when the Big Boss came out to give an update about his weight-loss journey, followed by bringing his personal trainers up to podium to lead us all through some exercises.

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  261. Sera*

    I worked at the corporate office of a llama part distributor that had warehouses in several states around the country. We had a raise freeze for 2 years. At the end of the end of the two years we got a newsletter with photos of the mansion in California he bought for when he’s visiting the California warehouse. He’s there less than 2 weeks a year.

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  262. In a better place by far*

    After Hurricane Sandy there was a monthly social hour for the whole office. The point of the social hour was everyone to check in on each other, staff up to CEO. The C suite spent the whole social hour talking not about the condition their 2nd homes, but their 3rd or 4th homes or their boats. It shouldn’t have surprised me 10 years later when the business closed. They gave hundreds of employees 30 days notice in August, and many of those same big wigs take the last 2 weeks off to go to those other homes. Leaving their admins (some of who had 5-6 top brass to support) to take care of all their files. “I can’t possibly sort this out, she will take care of it! I have to leave for my vacation!”

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    1. Rainy*

      My sister volunteered for a hurricane cleanup trip through her church sometime in the early 2000s and expected to be mucking out people’s houses or moving storm debris, things that would actually benefit the community.

      Instead, she and a crew of 20 other young people spent two weeks repainting some rich lady’s house.

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  263. JennyEm56*

    I work for a non-profit, one that serves and does services for institutions, many of whom have declining budgets that are already small.

    My director was at a vendor luncheon and was telling how he gave his daughter $100K for her wedding, and she was complaining about the budget constraints. My director was just stunned because there are many organizations we work with that have annual budgets much less than that, yet pretty much have to use said vendor’s products.

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  264. Kendall^2*

    My department chair complained multiple times to me (half-time admin) how difficult it was to live in HCOL area. That I also lived in. On less than a quarter of what he was making. He actually was a nice guy in other ways, but this was just so tone deaf.

    Years before that, I was working at an editing subcontractor that was bought out by a larger competitor. The new brass had a meeting for everyone to explain all the new rules, insurance info, etc. And then right after that, called me into a meeting to lay me off. Why did they make me sit through the first meeting?! I have no idea. (They turned out to be horrible to their workers, so in the long run, it was a bullet dodged, but in the short term lack of employment sucked.)

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  265. CeeDoo*

    Several years ago, we had a school-wide meeting with the superintendent (200 or so teachers). We have them every year, and they only exist for us to all see the supe’s face and listen to a rah-rah-rah. He was talking about our bond issue and how it was thanks to the bond that we had our brand new gym. We had no brand new gym. He got corrected LOUDLY. That was a different kind of out-of-touch. (we still have no brand new gym, 4 or 5 years later)

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  266. Dr. BOM*

    Just realized I had one of my own.

    It was the annual Christmas party and we were still seated after dinner while senior leadership gave a bunch of self-congratulation speeches. Then the (rather drunk) CEO started announcing promotions. Which was almost exclusively for various senior managers – picture directors moving to VP or VP to SVP. The most galling one was where they started describing who we thought was someone who was definitely deserving of a promotion, only for us to realize they were describing an absolute snake of a senior manager getting a director position.

    That was one of the last Christmas parties I bothered attending.

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  267. I Edit and I Know Things*

    This may include enough details that previous coworkers could recognize the story, but I’m not terribly worried at this point in my career. Context for the story: I live in Alabama. We don’t have salt trucks or snow plows. We don’t typically need them, and these days it’s easier to work remotely than risk your life on icy roads. It’s also important to note that this takes place in 2016, and in 2014, we had a horrible ice/snow storm that left people stranded for days.

    The story: Pre-COVID and two jobs ago, I had a commute between 30 minutes to an hour, depending on traffic. Any way I took, there were bridges and overpasses to cross. My company didn’t have the best remote work options; the VPN for the server was glitchy and often failed to connect. We also didn’t have company issued laptops at the time, so had to use personal devices to work from home.

    Snow gets predicted for mid-week, and because of the issues two years prior, people are naturally in a bit of a panic, planning for how or if they would work during the snow. The CEO comes out of his office and goes, “Well, I can walk to the office, so I’ll be here! You all should be here, too!”

    We all just looked at him like he had two heads. Our office was in a fairly affluent area of town, but no one really made enough to live in that area and most of us had decent commutes. One of the more senior staff members laughed and said that wasn’t happening, and we all went back to planning our snow day. On the positive side, he may have huffed off in the moment, but no one got penalized for not coming in. (And yes, the roads were iced over.)

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  268. Hyacinth*

    I work in financial services and my boss absolutely does not understand how some people live paycheck to paycheck. He has his rent and utilities including phone covered by our employer and has a company vehicle he uses all the time. All he pays for is his food. Whereas, others, like peons like me, have to pay for all our own bills. My child gets reduced rate meals at school but I make too much for other assistance. He was flabbergasted when I dropped one time that she had reduced rate meals.

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  269. Llama herder*

    I can feel the cringe 3 years later on this one. We had a brand new executive for our org, let’s say the new Chief Llama Officer. One of 8 reporting to the CEO so very high in the company. At one of the first all employee meetings, his attempt to relate to everyone was to tell a story about getting pulled over by the cops for speeding (to his credit, I don’t think he mentioned he drove a Ferrari or whatever, but a lot of people knew). He then tells this story about how he has this card in his wallet that he believes gets him out of being pulled over. Like, his friend who’s a cop gave it to him and assured it will work with cops alllll across the U.S. He pulls the “friend of cop” card out, it doesn’t work, the cops are not amused. So that is the punchline. That he, a rich white man, thinks the law doesn’t fully apply to him. Lolz!

    This was 2021 IIRC, so heightened awareness of police shootings, many recent protests of such, really no excuse for him to not have that on his radar. At this point in time, our org of 500+ allowed for digital submission of anonymous questions/comments during the meeting. They LIT HIM UP. Anonymous comments were never allowed again.

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  270. Burnt Out Librarian*

    During the beginning of COVID when we couldn’t get our hands on masks or other PPE or any cleaning supplies, our director decided to show off the 3D printed masks that were getting made for the administrative folks (the ones that had closed offices and could work from home unlike the rest of the pleb staff). She took a picture to post on social media and in the background was a pile of old promotional shirts– specifically the ones staff were tearing apart and sewing to try to make our own masks to protect ourselves because we were still being forced to come into a building with a bunch of other people during the initial outbreak. We were one of the worst affected counties in the US at the time.

    But y’know! Resource hoarding for the elite! Yay!

    A few weeks later she hosted a webinar about “keeping staff engaged” during “lockdown” (again, we still had to come in multiple days a week). Her way of actually keeping us busy? We had to fill out our timesheets in excruciating detail– and in triplicate. She was out of touch and socially dense as a brick wall in the best of times, but during COVID her nonsense was off the chart.

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  271. whatchamacallit*

    *not* a company exec story, per se but:
    When I was in grad school, we had to do this 2 week intensive culminating in a final project presentation. This involved a lot of panels of industry people to help with career development. One of them was the President/Executive Director of one of the major centralized party campaign committees. She was there to give advice on networking to get a job. Her position typically pays in the six figures.
    Her advice came down to:
    -Inviting people for coffee, that you would pay for, and then send a thank you email. While you don’t have a job, or are underemployed. You should be inviting more important people on coffee dates left and right apparently and paying for them. I’m not opposed to paying when you invite a person to coffee for networking purposes, but the power dynamics and the tone deafness that a bunch of us making $0 to minimum wage should just be doing so all the time if we ever wanted to land a job was kind of insulting.
    -We should be more than willing to do an unpaid internship. This was 2017, so unpaid internships were just beginning to kind of become frowned on in our industry, and more and more people were highlighting how they limit opportunities for anyone not already from money. I didn’t love the suggestion, but okay, it wasn’t unusual advice. However, naturally, a bunch of us had questions about “how are we supposed to afford living expenses while working for free, do you have tips on managing that situation” and the person got very defensive and basically told all of us we had to pay our dues like everyone else. She proceeded to tell us “I’ve made sacrifices too, guys. I went to state school.” As if that information was supposed to help any of us raising concerns about not getting evicted while serving as an unpaid serf somewhere. (Not the point, but the private college I attended for undergrad ended up the same price after financial aid as the state-school I was also considering, so this was just a weird justification to use.) This was also taking place at the private institution we were enrolled in for grad school, so it also seemed kinda victim blamey. I was hoping she could at least give suggestions of part time jobs or something other people were able to pull off while they were doing their indentured servitude, but she had nothing on that front other than the “I did it so you should have to do it too” attitude.

    The whole thing devolved into implying we were being ungrateful and unrealistic for suggesting most of us could not afford to work for free indefinitely until someone benevolently gifted us a job after groveling over coffee enough times.
    She’s still ED of that organization! No, I have not asked her to get coffee.

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  272. CTD*

    A C-Suite executive complained to a group of interns that ever since he started regularly flying first class for business he just couldn’t fly economy anymore when travelling for personal reasons from our West Coast office to Europe – he’d gotten too used to the comforts of first class and so he was forced to spend extra money to upgrade.

    Needless to say no one had a ton of sympathy for his terrible plight.

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  273. Chez*

    When I worked at the state Bar Association, we ran a wellness campaign for lawyers focused on complete wellness: physical, mental, financial, social, etc. We had a weekly social media challenge and asked participants to write in with how they completed that week’s challenge. My job was to select the best answers and share them in a newsletter.

    When it came to the financial week, someone wrote in that they saved money by not buying the $1000 shoes, finding an alternative for only $500. I made less than $15/hr at the time and was aghast! We did not use it for the newsletter.

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  274. Sharkie*

    December 2021. I was working for a sports team that was historically bad and a joke within the league. The owners were so budget conscience that they wouldn’t buy us pens or kleenex for the office that the made us come into. We have an all hands call zoom call where they announce that they are cancelling the Holiday Celebration due to covid safety (yet we had to be in office 3 days a week?!?) and all rasies and bonuses would be on hold until 2023. The team owner was telling us this while sitting in the office of his mansion with gold flake covered crown molding. He then goes “Don’t worry! We got you a present. Look under your chairs!” . The whole office (Yes almost the entire organization that was not in the C suite had to come in. During 2021) looked under our chairs to pull out a single lottery scratch off ticket per person. It was like the air was sucked out of the entire building.

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  275. MrsTubbs*

    CEO does annual Town Halls from TV studios in exotic locations. Complete with full Oprah entrance with audience clapping / whooping and handshakes.

    We then get a lecture on the need for expense control with veiled references to budget cuts and layoffs.

    From a person who stays in the most expensive hotel in the city when they’re over and flies everywhere on a private jet. Expense management is for little people.

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  276. WickedProse*

    One of the directors at my firm retired last year. We were all made to go to a fancy dinner for her, which was extremely extra – balloons and confetti with her face on them, for example – after which she gave a speech. A big chunk of said speech was about how grateful she was for the amount of money she had earned in the role and the great standard of living it had given her. We’re massively underpaid by industry standards and there are a lot of staff members struggling to get by. Being made to spend our lunch break listening to someone tell us how rich we’d made her, whilst contemplating (a) the insulting raises we’d recently received and (b) the cost of this fancy dinner and printing vast amounts of stuff with the director’s face on it, wasn’t a great morale booster. Still, we each got a tiny bag of candy to take away. With the director’s face printed on it…

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  277. Solayan*

    When I was working for a moderately-sized charity we had a particularly out-out-touch moment at our Holiday party. There was already some mild resentment since staff were expected to pay for their tickets to the party, presumably to cover the finger food and venue rental, and then also pay for any/all drinks they wanted since it was against organizational policy to pay for any alcohol. We also had a door prize draw included in the price of the ticket. When I first started there were lots of good prizes (electronics etc.), but over the years the draw got worse and worse, until it was mostly leftover branded trash with one or two actually good prizes. This particular year, the only good prize in the draw was an iPad, which was won by… the CEO, who we all knew made 2-4x what most of us did, particularly after multiple years of salary freezes. Even after a few nudges about the terrible optics he decided to keep the prize since he’d paid for his ticket like everybody else. The following year they changed the rule to exclude the CEO and VPs from the draw, but still made everyone pay for their own party.

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  278. Tegan Keenan*

    Large local employer was failing, pretty spectacularly. My spouse was still working there and I had left about a year earlier. Many, many people in the community had purchased stock (and were watching the stock prices tumble).

    During the week of another round of layoffs, the relatively new CEO had her brand-new luxury vehicle delivered to the main office (which was nearly all windows). It was unloaded right out front in the fire lane while employees watched. My spouse was not certain, but felt it was utter cluelessness, rather than dickishness.

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  279. No good*

    The owner of my previous company has a Bentley, Rolls Royce, and several other $100k+ showy vehicles. He has also spent somewhere between $16-32 million to build a mosque in Florida. Among other things! Meanwhile, the people he employs in lower positions get paid $12/hr, which is actually less than the position was paid a few years ago. We’re not in a low COL area, either.

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  280. Rainy*

    I work in academia. At my last institution, the VC for our division was very butts-in-seats (despite herself being WFH the majority of the time of course), and decreed that no unit in the division could close its doors for more than an hour during the day, and that every unit had to maintain 75% in-office staffing at all times. Some units in the division had 20-30 people. A couple have many more than that. Several have 2-4 people because they are internal-facing units that do the kind of work that just grinds away in the background and can be done super easily from home. She never specified how an office with 2 people is supposed to maintain 75% staffing and never close the doors ever. For that matter, my old office ran into problems because our front desk staff were non-exempt and not cleared for overtime (thankfully for them) and the doors were supposed to be open 45 hours per week (8-5 M-F).

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  281. Anita Brake*

    One summer in Phoenix, a powerful microburst hit the city. Just before it arrived, an enormous shelf cloud loomed over South Mountain, moving northward. From the high-rise where I worked, my colleagues and I stood by the windows, watching in awe as the massive cloud approached—it was a truly epic sight.

    Then, the storm unleashed its fury, pounding the city and leaving a trail of destruction—thousands of damaged roofs, homes, outbuildings, and trees. As we stood there, mesmerized and concerned for our safety, the CEO walked by and, despite the floor-to-ceiling windows giving him a clear view of the storm, simply said, “What are we doing here? Get back to work!”

    At that exact moment, my phone rang. It was my 10-year-old daughter, calling to tell me that all the windows at the front of our house had shattered. Without hesitation, I left and rushed home to check on my family—my daughter, son, and husband.

    Driving into our neighborhood, I was met with chaos—roof debris flapping in the wind, fallen trees blocking parts of the street, and broken windows everywhere. Half of our own windows were gone, and glass was scattered throughout the house.

    To this day, I’ve thought back on my CEO’s reaction and found it incredibly heartless. And yet, I remained at that job for several more years.

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  282. glt on wry*

    I worked at a bakery whose owners used every legal (and not-so legal) measure to maximize employee sweat without having to pay us. For example: they kept us at a 4-day work week/ not official full-time hours so as not to have to pay for benefits; they tried to get their less-than-20 employees to sign off on ever getting overtime with a specific government exemption generally used for agriculture workers that balanced out max times with fallow times (we were baking wholesale, not trying to harvest a crop before the freeze).

    These married owners had at least three luxury cars, ankle-length fur coats (which they actually still wore in public in the noughties), and took a multi-week annual holiday in Florence. I couldn’t even make rent with my biweekly paycheque and was going into credit-card debt trying to pay for groceries.

    Anyway, the woman of this couple still liked to work on the floor occasionally. She was doing her thing in my section and noticed my decrepit, chocolate-stained bakery shoes (which no doubt she’d been aghast at before) and so launched into a passive-aggressive storytime about how she just loved to get herself a new pair of shoes every year and how freaking great it felt to have these freaking new shoes to wear at work!

    Me: Yes, but you make more than minimum wage.

    Awkward silence! She wasn’t used to confrontation.

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  283. Beauty and Roast Beef*

    Ooh just thought of another. My mom had a medical emergency (brain aneurysm) and miraculously survived. She was denied short term disability so she went back to work after a few weeks at home recovering and once she could handle looking at a computer screen without getting a headache. Her boss, the owner of the company, asked her to meet with him, and immediately started talking about putting her on a payment plan (!) because of how much they had to shell out to the health insurance company for her surgery. This was after denying her raises for *years* because they considered her health insurance costs as part of her salary and said all-in it was ‘competitive’ for the area. She left that day and never went back.

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  284. RJ*

    About 10 years ago I worked at a company that employed a lot of young people who were new to the industry. Most of us were not making a ton of money working there. It wasn’t abject poverty, but it wasn’t much in the way of disposable income. The company provided a free lunch every Friday, and obviously based on the demographics this was something workers looked forward to every week.

    However, the company COO was clearly annoyed at how people would rush to the free lunch, so he would regularly say stuff like “Lunch is canceled this week! Go back to work!” and then when people reacted negatively he would complain that nobody got his “sense of humor.” Such a charmer!

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  285. oona*

    I worked at a horrible law firm about 10 years ago. Not long after I started the two buildings on either side of ours were knocked down and a massive construction project started. It was hell. Every time it rained the basement where all the legal assistants worked flooded. It rained everyday for 4 months. The basement was carpeted and the smell of mildew was overpowering. The law firm hired cleaners and the products they used were worse than the mildew. You could barely breathe half the time. They eventually ripped out the carpet and summer came but our troubles were not over. That was when construction really began next door. The jackhammers were so loud it was impossible to talk on the phone, and they filled the office with a thick cloud of dust.

    We begged the executive team to let us work from home or at least on a different floor of the building – the law firm owned the whole building and the upper floors were empty. They said no. They told us it was important that we work together in the basement because collaboration is important. We would not be able to collaborate working from home, and the upper floors were smaller and we would not be able to fit the whole team on one floor, and that would compromise our ability to collaborate too much.

    The executives rarely, if ever, worked in-person. When they did they worked out of an office in a different state. They never visited our horrible little office except for one time. They sent the named partner and a few of the top attorneys at the firm to explain to us that the problem was not the constant flooding and dust storms in the office building, but rather our attitudes about it.

    I quit that horrible place after about a year and did not think about that job for many years after. And then recently I got a new job. I showed up to work on my first day, and I learned I now work in one of the buildings that caused all the flooding and dust storms I had to deal with back then. I even saw one of my old co-workers who for reasons I can’t fathom still works at that insane law firm. I guess she just has a better attitude than me.

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    1. CeeDoo*

      One year, the roof of our building got ripped off. (Ironically, we had a contractor doing roof repair. Before leaving for the weekend, the workers covered their equipment and materials with tarps that they attached to the roof air conditioning units. We had near-tornado level winds that weekend that whipped the tarps away, also ripping up some of the AC units.) The entire upper floor was completely waterlogged and mildewed. A person from central office called me to tell me not to come up to the building because my room was uninhabitable and she knew I had bad allergies. In a very large school district, that was nice. When we were finally able to return, my class was moved to the ROTC storage room, but the thought was nice.

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      1. DramaQ*

        I think I can beat that. We were told to keep working even though the city had shut off water to our city blocks. We had no running water for washing hands (we worked in a bacteria lab) and we couldn’t flush the toilets.

        We were told we weren’t allowed to go home that we needed to stay the full 8 hours. By the owner who was working from home that day.

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  286. Reedy*

    There was an extremely high-profile case being tried two blocks over from our downtown office building. The day the verdict was going to be announced, we started seeing news alerts that many companies were letting people leave early/work remotely from downtown offices in the anticipation that there could be significant protests or possibly rioting when the verdict was read. When this was brought up to our CEO as a concern with the request to let people head home early and work the rest of the day remotely, they blithely replied that if we got stuck it was no big deal and we could order in diner on the company dime until everything “calmed down.” As if some superhuman food delivery folks would prioritize their own well being and safety to make sure some random office workers got fed. Not to mention anyone who was worried about getting home to say, pick up and care for children, parents, pets or other loved ones–or people who just didn’t want to be suck in an office building for an indeterminate amount of time. Thankfully no one got stuck and the trial ended peacefully, but I’ll never forget how completely out of touch that response was–it was the first of many.

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  287. lowlymanager*

    An ED at the company I work for recommended I buy a perfume I complimented “next time you’re in Europe, because it’s much cheaper there.” She has also said in the past, “you must fly first class, there’s no other way to travel.” LOLOL

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  288. Frances*

    Oh we were expected to give the CEO a baby shower and all employees were expected to attend whether they wanted to or not.

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    1. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

      Yeah I had a director, whose admin assistant sent a memo out for the director’s birthday gift – suggested donation $5.

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  289. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

    Yeah I have too many over-the-top stories to tell. Some years ago, once-upon-a-time…

    A senior executive was arrested for a DUI. Because his blood alcohol was over a certain limit, on his conviction, he was sentenced to 14 days in the county jail. Not community service. Not Sundays when it’s too rainy to play golf.

    14 Days! Bring toothbrush and pajamas!

    All the other managers, directors, etc. were walking around, lamenting that it was bad, this is just a “nuisance”, ohhh the humanity!

    Now, I was eating a SPAM roast for dinner two nights a week and working two jobs. I heard from one manager “yeah but do you know bad HE (the executive) has it? He had to cancel a CRUISE he was going to take, so he could go to jail! IMAGINE THAT!”

    Yeah I can imagine. Not much because I never have gone to jail.

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    1. The_artist_formerly_known_as_Anon-2*

      I could , and was planning to, write a book of weird stuff like this = “Dinner Table Stories – 150 tales from 50 years in the computer business”…..no, no need to. Everyone has a handful.

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  290. Smurfette*

    I worked at a 90s tech startup that had done really well, and the owners / execs (who came from family money) had made personal fortunes from their successful business – while still in their 20s.

    At one of the company’s casual social get togethers, an announcement was made that one of the directors had won a significant amount of money at a casino (the amount was specified). There was a stunned silence while people tried to process the fact that this obnoxious jerk who already had more money than we could dream of, was now even wealthier. To add insult to injury, he expected everyone to be impressed and/or excited for him. We were neither.

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  291. Jennifer Juniper*

    Everyone in my training class had to write an essay the first day.

    The theme?

    “Why I admire CEO.”

    I didn’t know his name. The trainer gave us his name and a deck of facts. I was able to write some bullshit with no problem.

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  292. Not Talent Show Please*

    I work at a US university that has a new Dean from abroad. She wants to build our sense of community, so she solicited the staff for ideas. A lot of great ones were floated, knowledge shares, birthday cakes, guided tours of the museum and gardens, coffee hours. She hears all this and decides we’re having a talent show.

    The team putting it on are practically begging people to attend and add all this extra food and alcohol to get people to show up. Talent show night, the party is well attended, but now no one goes over to hear the talent performances. So the Dean starts pressuring people to go over. I see a bunch of people head for the exit instead or just stay in the back and talk. But overall the Dean seems really happy.

    Fast forward one week and it’s Jan 20, half our funding is getting cut, people are likely going to lose their jobs, and she is on vacation out of the country. I”m hearing comparisons of Nero playing the fiddle while Rome is burning.

    I hope she had a really good time at the talent show.

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  293. Dawn*

    My husband and I have both been teachers for 15+ years, so we went through the whole covid thing, which people might remember as the time when teachers were still liked and being called heroes (before we lost our way in our haste to perform as many gender reassignment surgeries in homeroom as possible). My state returned to in-person schooling for the 20-21 school year, with strict and onerous health regulations, but staff meetings were remote. My husband was a special educator: a profession that, at the best of times, is stretched thin across too much need, too much paperwork, and not enough people willing to sign up for that. It is not uncommon for special educators to work significantly beyond their contract (i.e., for free, for you non-union folks) in order to do it all.

    The special-ed department for our district decided to have an online staff meeting that all the special educators were required to attend. The director of special ed was retiring, and yeah, it would be normal to acknowledge that and say a few kind words, but instead, they decided to hijack the entire meeting to play trivia games about the retiring director.

    So you have special educators stretched to the breaking point, trying to figure out how to do their jobs part in-person and part online (when classes would “pivot to remote” with less than an hour’s warning due to a positive test in the class), inundated in extra paperwork to document said online services, bogged down by safety regulations that had them sanitizing individual pencils every day, and risking their lives to provide in-person education to students whose parents had varying levels of willingness to comply with covid regulations, and instead of giving those people an extra hour of work time on the clock, forcing them to bear the opportunity cost of an hour of games tailored to someone who sat in an office all day and took on none of the risk she was happy to delegate to her underlings.

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  294. anonymous worker ant*

    A few years ago, my organization was hit by a computer virus that eventually (after months of staff putting in IT tickets that were ignored) required shutting down our entire network and isolating all computers from the internet for several months. This happened right before our annual all-staff meeting, so at the meeting the IT director’s boss did a Q&A for staff about the virus.

    Questions and answers that are still legendary among the staff:
    Q: Will the virus have any affect on our fax machines and faxing services?
    A: Haha, I’m not sure, but gosh, I can’t remember the last time I heard somebody mention fax machines! I’m sure it won’t come up.
    (Offering faxing to customers is one of our core services.)

    Q: You suggested we bring USB drives from home to back up work on, since we can’t use the network drives. Are we completely sure this virus can’t infect the USB drives?
    A: Viruses can’t infect USB drives, so don’t worry about it.
    (A week later we were told absolutely do not use USB drives, as anyone who knows anything about computer security knows…)

    Q: Have we figured out how the virus got through our antivirus software?
    A: We’re working on it, but I want to remind staff that it’s their responsibility to make sure they install antivirus software on their office computers.
    (Simultaneous scream from the entire meeting: NO IT ISN’T)

    Anyway, the IT director ended up in prison for embezzlement by the end of it, but the boss is still in the job and the obliviousness is still legendary and ongoing.

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  295. Still starved*

    We organise regular all day meetings which include wrap style lunches. Staff spend first part of lunch wrapping loose ends, grab a bite/mingle with attendees then prep for afternoon!
    Manager who is the first to grab lunch blew me up over something and told me I’d have to wait until others ate and if there was nothing left I’d have to go without.
    I’m diabetic (haven’t told work) but would have loved to have said “I’m diabetic so good luck dealing with it if I go into a hypoglycaemic coma!”
    I should have said “then when I’ve wrapped up loose ends and prepped for the arvo I’ll be taking half an hour to source and eat lunch.”
    But we do order enough lunch to include all staff so the above doesn’t need to happen. Want staff to cut their lunch short have to feed them!

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  296. Frieda*

    I work for a small-ish health insurance adjacent company that has the philosophy that employees need to walk the talk regarding benefits which means yay, high deductible health plans and limited networks. It comes up every time at the end-of-year all-employee calls that people aren’t happy with their health plan choices and we always get the same corporate-speak non-answers. This year’s all-employee call happened a few days after the Luigi incident so emotions on the topic were very high. We got the usual elevator speech about our benefits, and since they no longer let us ask questions verbally, the Q & A message box was flying fast with angry questions and snarky comments. We’re all watching them fly by while the CEO calmly says let’s take a few questions from the Q and A box and the moderator just as calmly says, “We’re getting a lot of folks who are concerned about your safety during this difficult time. What steps are being taken to ensure your safety?”

    It’s probably a good thing they mute us.

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  297. AnonymousForThis*

    The owner of an accounting firm decided to pay me only $15/hr for an accounting position. In California. I felt cheated. This was a desk job 9-to-5, not a “typical” minimum wage job. Also, California just passed the $15/hr minimum wage law that year which made it sting even more. Looking back, I should have never accepted the position but as a relatively new job seeker at the time, I accepted because I thought I could get experience and that any money was better than no money. Boy, was I wrong.

    He also drove a top end BMW while the rest of us all drove secondhanded used cars. Let’s just say I got fired from that job 5 months later. Not for a bad attitude, but my work suffered because I was not happy with getting such a low pay, no matter how much I tried to push myself to do my best and look on the bright side. Lesson learned.

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  298. Flit*

    I am in a snowy state, which can occasionally make your commute a lot more interesting. It’s very hit or miss, too- you can leave half an hour early and get there 25 minutes early, or leave half an hour early and get there 10 minutes late. We had a new boss and the week after a major snowfall she reminded everyone very seriously that we needed to be there on time regardless of weather. We do not have coverage-based positions. A few weeks after that we had another snowstorm, and she emailed us to say that she’d be working from home until the plows came through. It really soured me on her. Current boss just wants us to be safe and isn’t worried about 5 minutes here or there.

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  299. A. Thrope*

    This was back in my retail days. One winter I had myself a cry in the break room because I couldn’t afford holiday gifts for anyone, and my new manager (who presented herself as the “cool, young” type who didn’t enforce much of anything and was very chummy) offered to host a crafting party at her house for anyone who wanted to make jam or other handmade goods as gifts. After commiserating with the rest of us about how little we all made under this giant corporate umbrella, she then had us all take a tour of all the remodeling she’d just had done on her (fully owned and paid off) home, including a massive bathroom with a huge tub with whirlpool jets and a shower with two heads (one on either wall) so she and her boyfriend could shower together and not get cold. Oh, and one of my coworkers had just gone through a nasty breakup and was kicked out of her boyfriend’s house the week before.

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  300. Lakeside*

    I work for a company where the owners are out of touch in a Roses on Schitt’s Creek kind of way. Very nice people, kind and caring, provide a better-than-pleasant work environment, but clueless about how most people live. The majority of the workers are 1099 independent contractors, with a few (less than 20) regular staff. The pay for the staff is at the bottom of the scale. Think, highest ranking staff having to buy clothing from thrift stores, and needing roommates to afford housing. Once a year, they magnanimously invite us into their million dollar plus home, feed us middle of the road catering (think Chipotle, Noodles, so not bad but nothing exceptional) and bestow upon us a piddling cash bonus and a candy cane. It’s so very feudal.

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  301. Ski slope*

    Background: Employees of my company used to get all federal holidays off. Our customers, in contrast, typically give many of their employees only the Big 6 holidays off (Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day, Thanksgiving day, Christmas Day, New Years) and expect our support division to be available, which meant we had special coverage shifts for our “lesser” holidays.

    Then Juneteenth was added as a federal holiday. We’d been occasionally been getting a bonus floating once-a-year day off of vacation, but this would have been a commitment to a set day off. For some reason — and there are many possible reasons, some of which might even be plausible — the company decided to restructure our holiday scheme. Rather than getting all federal holidays off, we would get the Big Six off, and we would get PTO equivalent to the remaining number of federal holidays.

    That’s not necessarily a bad thing! For many of us, being able to use our time as we chose rather than according to the calendar was useful. HOWEVER. In announcing this, the (white) CEO explained the benefit as being “maybe, instead of on Martin Luther King weekend, you want to take your ski trip on a different weekend!”

    Because OBVIOUSLY no one has any intention to observe Juneteenth or MLK Jr. Day, right? Of all the federal holidays in the schedule, those two just HAD to be the one to end the guaranteed-day-off policy and the one that serves as a meaningless day off, right?

    (To my brain, “ski weekend” is also coded as a rich-white-people thing, but I didn’t grow up anywhere near skiing, and locals have assured me that part wasn’t as out-of-touch as it seemed to me.)

    In this same meeting, this same CEO assured us that she was fine to have her mask off for addressing the company-wide video meeting from her office, despite official policy to be masked in company buildings, because her office door was closed. Air circulation in our offices doesn’t care if doors are closed, of course, but over the course of the meeting, the office door behind her gradually swung and remained open, so that was a bonus “treat” for those of us paying attention.

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  302. Demidad*

    CEO of a reasonably big IT company in New Zealand, after the traditional annual celebration event about how we had a great year (but sadly not great enough to do payrises), announced the staff Christmas Party at his house so we could all admire his new swimming pool. Despite living in a different city to most of the workforce.

    He also used to start meetings by waving expensive bottles of alcohol around to show how successful he was (but sadly not successful enough to do payrises).

    He was a DEI hire – Dad’s Emissions Inherited the company

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  303. As I Sit Here on My Yacht*

    The University I work out rolled out a new financial system platform so poorly the story was covered by the news. Vendors weren’t getting paid for months, processes that took an hour now took a day, and standard financial tasks for any university, like having access to your own grant money, were completely inoperable. During the six month preview, people across the university were shouting at the consulting company, this is not working. Don’t roll it out yet! And yet, they did!

    The real kicker, the last day of the consultant’s contract. They sent an email congratulating themselves on a successful rollout. They started it “As I sit here on my yacht…”

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  304. Bookworm*

    No longer work there and neither does this exec but in early 2021 he mandated an RTO, no exceptions. No discussion if we’d finally FINALLY implement at least a hybrid schedule, what the standard would be re: COVID procedures (masks, air filters, verifying vax status?), or anything about the conversations WFH gave us (flexibility, etc.) as well as managing how not to possibly bring COVID home to roommates/family, etc.

    We were asked for opinions about this and it was basically a slew of comments asking about the above. But one of the variants started circulating so the discussion was tabled (I left before any of this happened, not specifically because of it but it would have been a last straw if I hadn’t already decided).

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  305. Daffy*

    Anyone remember the chaos and fear when covid vaccines were finally available but, in my country, were severely restricted and only available to the elderly and those with chronic health conditions? Well, guess what IT decided would be a great topic for a spam trial?

    That’s right. In their infinite wisdom, IT sent a spoof email from campus health services to thousands of staff, saying there were some spare vaccines and to click here to book a time.

    Within an hour, the health services had to turn off their phones as desperate staff tried to call and book. Security had to attend as a queue formed outside.

    IT’s defence? It totally worked because heaps of people clicked on the link. Our President tore them a new one that was spectacular to behold and they were no longer allowed to send spoof emails without Presidential approval.

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  306. AnonAnon*

    Was out to dinner with the CEO and a random bunch of folks from the office. The CEO who would tell me (senior finance person) “I don’t want anyone with a one handle in front of their salary” i.e. $100k or more. HUGE eye roll…
    One of the folks at the table mentioned she was looking at a house near a beachy area. The CEO said “Oh, for a beach house?” I kicked him under the table and he looked at me like I had three heads. The next day I was like “DUDE, she makes $65k and has two roommates! What flipping beach house??”

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  307. Startup_Shenanigans*

    I was the out of touch exec the other day. I was giving an employee a mortgage reference and the lender asked if I had any questions. I said, “No, I’ve never had a mortgage, I only do this from the referee side.” The lender paused and said, “Must be nice.”
    I MEANT I was a millennial who would never be in a financial position to have a mortgage. I rent and I barely got my last apartment approved because I run a startup and sign my own cheques. I give employees referrals, but I’m not allowed to give one to myself. But, the lender heard, “I’m so rich I buy my property outright.” Absolute face-palm when I realized an hour later….

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  308. Retired Fed*

    Back in the mid90s. All the logistics workforce in my org at an unnamed midwestern military establishment were invited to a briefing on the future of the workforce development and management. Some background: the vast majority (80% probably) were at grade gs-12 and were the journeymen, worker-bees. Gs-13s were the supervisors, gs-14 and 15s were management. The briefing very clearly laid out the “retirement eligibility bubble” the org was facing over the following 5-10 years. But they only did this for the -13s, -14s, and -15s. Being visibly pregnant (and super hormonal) I naturally asked what does the bubble look like for the 12s? You know, the people who actually DO THE DAMNED WORK and make up most of the workforce! I was told they didn’t run that analysis. This was after several years of hiring freeze and no new interns/trainees to replenish the pipeline. So, I’ll be expected to pick up the slack because my colleagues are retiring but all you want me to worry about is your management class retirement bubble. Brilliant! I asked why they didn’t run those numbers; never got an answer. The “leader” giving the briefing knew who I was … I got a mild “talking to” by my chain of command. I did not apologize.

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  309. Rebecca*

    I once worked at a tech “startup” that was really just a vanity project for the CEO, financed by her very wealthy husband. The company frequently had difficulty making payroll, and employees would get lengthy apologies each time their paychecks were delayed. However, no action was taken to make sure payroll could be met on time in subsequent pay periods. One day, she returned from a trip overseas and bragged loudly about the thousands of dollars of luxury handbags and clothing that she had failed to declare when returning to the USA. I think she thought we’d relate?

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  310. bripops*

    Several years ago one of the partners at my job was complaining about the office’s $3,000 espresso maker. He and I had a good rapport (I’d often gently rib him for being a coffee snob and he’d do the same about how I hate coffee) so I made a joke along the lines of “that espresso machine costs more than I make in a month so I’ll let you be the one to ask [CFO] about getting a better one” and he, very genuinely shocked, replied “but that’s such a cheap piece of crap, we must not pay you very much” (they didn’t, and I found out later that his home espresso machine had cost him about five grand)

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  311. Cai*

    Maybe not an executive but I will never, ever forget to doctor who came to speak at my college. it was a room full of undergrads considering going into medicine.

    Audience question: “how did you manage to balance to requirements of med school and residency with having a family?”

    Answer: “I was lucky – my wife handles most of that!”

    Reader.
    This was a

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    1. Cai*

      ugh! cut off too soon
      this was a WOMENS. COLLEGE.

      As in, everyone in the entire auditorium except for him was female-IDd or AFAB.

      it did not go over well.

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  312. pally*

    Back during the great recession, all of management was asked to take a 10 % decrease in pay.

    To management’s credit, non-management workers did not get any pay cut at all.

    We worked for years sans any pay raises.

    One day, the CEO let slip that the C-suite had all merely deferred payment of 10% of their paychecks. But the rest of the management were out of luck. We were never paid back that 10%. But C-suite collected their 10%.

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  313. lurkyloo*

    Worked at a small but thriving software company. Owner tells us ‘We’ve done so well this year, you’re all getting bonuses in January!’ Well whoopy!
    Right after Christmas, the owners daughter gets engaged, to be married in May.
    Mid-January ‘So sorry, bonuses will be in 6 months. We didn’t do as well as we thought.’
    That’s funny. As someone who logs the orders and amounts, I know what we brought in and roughly what the profits were and they were HIGHER than stated. Hmmm…..
    Some random date in mid-May, it’s a blustery day out. Owner swings in through the door, hair all askew. He laughs, patting it into place and says, jokingly, ‘My hair got caught in the wind on my yacht!’
    I looked at him and dryly stated ‘Well, now I know where the bonuses went.’
    He stopped laughing and slunk into his office.

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  314. Pumpkinn*

    Our company is doing a “meet the leadership” interview every week, which goes out in the company newsletter.
    They get more out of touch every week, referencing favourite golf courses in Switzerland, ski resorts in Canada, Michelin star restaurants, expensive holiday destinations they once spent a month at. We send each other our favourite outtakes, almost as a team bonding activity.
    About half the newsletter is dedicated to that.

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  315. Expensive Bones*

    After a slew of low paying jobs and lack of insurance, I finally landed a job with good enough insurance to get my wisdom teeth pulled in my late 20s. All 4 of them. All of them were impacted. It was brutal, I’d been in pain for months, and it was not cheap.

    The week before the scheduled surgery, the dental office called to say my insurance had lapsed. Relevant detail – I did not pay anything for my insurance, the company paid for it in full. I went to my manager (VP of HR) and it was an “accident”. Pretty sure it wasn’t, they were cancelling other benefits for hourly employees and nobody was announcing it. Something about contract employees being indistinguishable from salary employees.

    Anyway, he suggested I pay out of pocket and then get reimbursed once my insurance kicked back in. I told him it was $5,000 out of pocket. He said “okay”. I told him I didn’t have $5,000. He looked confused. I explained that I make $20/hr in New York City (did he not know how much I got paid, as my manager??) and I did not make enough to save $5,000, much less by next week. He suggested I put it on a credit card. I did not have a credit card at the time, and asked how I was supposed to get one with a $5,000 limit by next week. No response. I asked if he’d like to put it on his credit card. “I’ll talk to the person responsible for benefits”.

    My insurance was magically reinstated and I paid a whole $400 out of pocket for the gas to knock me out.

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  316. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

    At spouse’s OldJob, the director liked to endlessly complain about how she didn’t need the money but it was soooo boring to be retired and if she wasn’t doing this job she just didn’t know what to do with her life. She made six figures, her husband made almost seven figures, lower level staff were living paycheck to paycheck, middle management didn’t make much more than that, and she wouldn’t authorize merit or COL raises because she felt people should be more like her and “take responsibility for their own finances.” Her refusal to retire also prevented upward mobility for the entire org. But god forbid she’s bored in retirement.

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  318. IrishMN*

    This story is less egregious than many, but I was shocked by it. I had been an employee for maybe 2 or 3 years at this point (after starting as a temp) and the person managing the dept (let’s call her M) turned out later to be quite the whack job.

    So one day there were layoffs; not entirely unexpected because they’d had an efficiency expert hanging around and getting in the way for a few months, but it was still an unpleasant surprise. Most of the people getting laid off had been with the company for a very long time (10+ years).

    The laid off employees were pulled into an HR meeting and then send out to the (open plan) work area to gather their stuff.

    For some reason it never occurred to management to send the temp employees home before this!! They were seasonal employees who worked on stuff that (most, but not all of the) people being laid off did not do; however, they had just come out of training and the busy season had not yet started. They were regularly being sent home early due to lack of work. But that day they were all there, not working much, and witnessed everything.

    Get this: I was a trainer, and a year or so later there was a stand-up meeting and I was told by my manager to bring the trainees out to the work area to attend. The same manager from the layoffs (M) looked at us really weird and then said I should take them back into the training room. No explanation, made me feel/look like an idiot and I had no explanation for the trainees. Turned out it was a meeting about how the company wasn’t doing well, blahblahblah. I guess temps can witness layoffs but they can’t be there to be asked to use less paper towels when drying their hands because the company was in a financial pinch (yes, seriously, that is what she said).

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  319. froodle*

    I worked at an energy company that had, among other things:

    -delayed our January 2019 COL increases to August 2020

    – (while we were still waiting on the above) tried to retroactively slash our wages by 20% for three months during COVID (illegal to do it retroactively, and a 20% paycut would have taken a lot of us below the legal minimum wage

    -settled for “only” slashing it by 10% for 6 months

    -as payback for the above, also got rid of the 4% profit sharing for that period – so basically a bigger paycut because SLT was petulant at not being able to steal enough from our paycheques

    -wasted money on a vanity project called “Rant and Rave” where we spammed our customers with surveys…. while we were dealing with a paycut

    -tried to play fast and loose with sick leave pay for people who caught COVID as a result of working second jobs to counteract the above wage theft

    -tried to radically alter our job descriptions and have us sign off on it by using an automated PeopleHR notification that simply alerted us to download something and indicate we’d read it, subverting the whole process for changing job roles laid out in our contract and their own handbook

    -massively bungled a systems upgrade that led us unable to bill accurately for 18+ months

    -sent out an all-staff email stating that the billing department, who’d been crippled by SLT’s bungling of the above, needed help with their backlog and that the role was “really just typing on a computer” so anyone could help

    -when said team objected, claimed it was “a misunderstanding” – and then posted said email, unchanged, on the front of the intranet

    -reorganised the office layout to cram more staff into smaller rooms on the basis that she wanted the executives on one floor, essentially putting all of the rest of us at increased risk of COVID for an aesthetic – I knew the company didn’t value or respect it’s employees, but even I didn’t see “you’re not worth protection from a deadly virus” coming

    So that’s the landscape when the CEO decides to call an all-hands town hall where she can honk it up dipshit style about the exciting new offerings she wants us to foist on our customers – said “new” offerings being adjustable thermostats and smart NEST appliances. Groundbreaking!

    She then chooses to hype up these wonderous and previously unheard of devices by telling a story about… how it let her turn off the heating to bedrooms (plural!) that she wasn;t using, and how she used the cameras to spy on her cleaner who was rounding up her billable hours.

    Cool. Awesome. Love struggling to make ends meet in my one-bedroom flat while you flap your noisome gums about our multiple unused rooms and abusing the low-paid worker who does your housework.

    Absolute wretch of a human being. Completely without empathy and unable to see those “below” her as actual people.

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