Nobody really likes speaking with their bosses, even the best ones. We get nervous, we automatically think we’ve messed up, we start worrying they know something we don’t. But the worst day with our mediocre boss is nothing compared to what these people had to deal with when it came to their crazy supervisors—and occasionally their own co-workers.
1. Stay Hydrated For The Haters
I’m on a diet that requires me to drink a huge amount of water, so I carry a 1-liter Nalgene bottle with me all the time. I’m a mid-level manager at a company with about 60 employees. At the end of the workday, as I’m heading out, I usually pass the water cooler and fill up my bottle for the drive home. I honestly thought this was no big deal—I was very wrong.
Yesterday, I was doing exactly that when our office manager walked over and said, “You’re leaving for the day. The water is only for employees to drink while they’re working in the office.” I laughed, finished filling my bottle, and went home. I assumed she was joking, or at worst just having a rough day and taking it out on me.
Turns out, she wasn’t joking. This morning I came in and found an email from her addressed to me, my boss (the CEO/founder), and HR. In it, she said I was stealing from the company, that I didn’t stop filling my bottle or apologize right away when she confronted me, and that she was formally reporting the incident and asking for it to be documented.
As you can imagine, everyone else found it pretty funny. My boss, the CEO, called me laughing so hard he could barely get the words out. Someone even wrote, “Is proper hydration good for the company?” on my water bottle. Meanwhile, the office manager has spent the whole morning walking past my office and glaring at me.
2. Time Is Of The Essence
My boss once accused me of “time clock theft” while I was doing volunteer work. It was a small volunteer event, nothing major, and nobody was tracking hours for any reason. Also, this wasn’t court-ordered volunteer work or anything like that. At the end of the day, while we were cleaning up, I answered a phone call. The supervisor immediately got upset and said, “Get off the phone! That’s time clock theft!”
3. Drawing A Line In The Store
At the time, I was working retail at Best Buy. They had me assigned to the MP3 player and cell phone department, even though DVDs and video games were much more in my area of knowledge. Still, I worked where they put me and did my job well. During the Christmas season, the store got so busy that everyone was helping out across departments.
I was standing in my own area when a woman came over and asked about some headphones, so I helped her. Then she asked whether the Dance Revolution mat she bought for her daughter was any good. I asked if she already had any of the games to use with it—she didn’t—so I showed her a slightly more expensive but better Konami mat that came with a game.
She thanked me because she hadn’t realized the mat needed a game to go with it, and then she left. I thought I had done the right thing—but my boss had a completely different reaction. My department manager came up behind me, told me to meet him in the break room in five minutes, and then started scolding me for selling something tied to video games.
He explained that the department with the highest revenue got bonuses—which was only true for him, not for the rest of us—and said we shouldn’t be helping customers in other sections buy more expensive items. He told me he’d be surprised if I lasted past the winter. I just said, “Yes, sir,” and went back to work. In January, I was fired based on a “department manager recommendation.”
So if you shop at Best Buy, just know the departments may have their own priorities when it comes to helping you.
4. What A Load Of Garbage
I once had an employer write me up for stealing trash. What was really happening was that one of my duties at the end of each shift was to collect all the trash. A lot of the time, I would sort through it and separate paper, soda cans, and water bottles into the company recycling bin. Our company had a special arrangement with the trash service where we earned money based on how many pounds we recycled.
It worked out to about $1,500 a month, and on top of that, we didn’t have to pay a trash bill. So, long story short, I got a final write-up for “stealing company time” by sorting recyclables. But it gets better. After that, I stopped doing it, and the next month our manager got upset because she suddenly had to pay the trash bill. She called the trash company, and they explained that for the past two years, the company hadn’t paid for trash pickup because we had been recycling so much.
So not only were we getting a $1,500 check every month, we were also getting free trash service. Apparently, my boss thought those checks were some kind of personal bonus for her. Anyway, the district manager was reviewing write-ups and noticed that I had been written up for “stealing trash,” so he called me and asked what was going on. I explained the recycling program and how it worked.
He thanked me and said I’d done a great job. Then things got even better. The next day, he flew in to meet with my manager. He asked her what had happened to the $20,000 she had received from the trash company. She apparently tried to blame me, and the district manager fired her on the spot. After she was escorted out, he called me into the office.
He explained what had happened in the meeting and offered me a promotion to Assistant Manager.
5. They Are Out To Get You
After working at Subway for five years—three of them as a manager—I was accused of turning off the store cameras and getting high in the cooler. None of it was true, and I quit not long after. Later, though, I found out what was really going on. It turned out the owner, who disliked me for no clear reason, had been trying to set me up so he could fire me.
6. Back-End Shrimp Deals
I worked in a restaurant for a couple of years as a day supervisor. One of my jobs was handling the twice-weekly orders. When deliveries arrived, I had to make sure everything on the invoice was actually there and sort it out with the driver if anything was missing. One day, a case of shrimp was missing. I pointed it out, the driver marked it on the invoice, removed it, and adjusted the total.
About a month or two later, the exact same thing happened again, and it was handled the same way. As a quick side note, I had almost no real authority as a “supervisor.” I didn’t make hiring decisions, I couldn’t fire anyone, and most people didn’t really listen to me since my coworkers were all in their 40s or older, while I was a 19-year-old college student with a better title than they had.
Even so, I got along well with everyone. Anyway, one of the cleaners drank on the job constantly. I reported it to the head chef, I reported it to the general manager, and nobody cared. Eventually, one day, it became a bigger issue because she either didn’t show up or called out without notice. That’s when I found out how underhanded she could be.
She accused me of stealing things to take attention off herself. Not long after, the HR/finance manager approached me about these missing cases of shrimp that we never received or paid for. She came at me like she already suspected me and said, “Somebody sure likes shrimp,” implying that I was working with the delivery driver to steal it.
I hate seafood, so at first I laughed, but then I got really angry when I realized she was serious. After that, things got tense with people I used to get along with because they thought I had thrown the other employee under the bus to cover for my own supposed shrimp-stealing. I quit soon after. It’s still one of the most absurd situations I’ve ever been part of.
7. Watch Your Language
I once used the phrase “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” around a manager who had never heard it before. Later, she called me into her office and asked why I was saying something so disgusting. She accused me of being disturbed and said I must hurt animals, then threatened to fire me if she ever heard me say anything like that again. She genuinely had never heard the expression before.
8. Nickle And Diming
I got accused of stealing a salad when I worked as a cashier at a grocery store in high school. Because they had scheduled me for 6.5 hours, I only got a 15-minute break instead of a 30-minute one. I spent the first eight minutes or so of my break on the phone with a mechanic trying to deal with car problems. Then I ran back to the little café near the back of the store.
There was a salad bar there, so I quickly made myself a salad, which you were supposed to weigh and price at the café. By then, I had about five minutes left on my break, and the manager was extremely strict about not going over the 15 minutes. So I stood at the café register for at least a minute, and nobody was there. I quickly ate the salad, then brought the sticker up to the front registers to pay the $1.99.
I went back on the clock, and about 20 minutes later I was called into the office. They were being very ominous and said a “situation” had happened, but wouldn’t explain what it was. Then they sent me home for the day. When I came back for my shift the next day, they called me into the office again. This time, the store manager, assistant manager, office manager, café manager, and my shift supervisor were all there.
Keep in mind, I was a 16-year-old at my first job and had never been in any kind of trouble. That’s when they accused me of stealing the salad because, “Even though our records show you paid for it, you ate it before paying.” I was stunned. I explained that there was no cashier at the café register when I was there.
I told them that if I wanted to eat during my break, my only option at that point was to eat it there and pay as soon as I could. They told me to go home and said they would let me know the next day whether I still had a job. I left in tears, but later I got angry at how wildly they had overreacted. So I came back an hour later and told them I quit. I’m still glad I did.
9. The Stuffed Elephant In The Room
I worked in a souvenir shop at an amusement park. It was the Fourth of July, which meant one of the busiest days of the year because of the fireworks show. We were also understaffed. The shop was right inside the gate, so it always got packed just before closing with people buying all the things they didn’t want to carry around all day.
I was left alone in the shop just before closing, running the register while people kept pouring in. It was complete chaos. While we were closing out the register that night, someone realized a large stuffed animal had been stolen. That’s when my trouble started. The manager simply could not understand that one person running an overcrowded store cannot prevent theft, especially when not every display is visible from the register.
I figured it was probably a team effort, with one or two people distracting me while someone else walked out with the toy, but I didn’t say that because I honestly had no idea when or how it happened. My boss then accused me of being involved and deliberately looking the other way while a friend stole it so we could somehow profit from it later. I didn’t even know how to respond.
I was 17, it was my first job, and I cried for days because I honestly thought every job I’d ever have would be like that one.
10. Pick Up The Phone
My former boss kept very strange hours, took a lot of sleeping pills, would work for two days straight, and then disappear for a day. Things like that. He was a real mess and clearly dealing with something serious. We would have the same meetings and cover the same items multiple times. I don’t know what was driving all of it, but it felt like part of a much bigger problem.
Anyway, he was also a terrible driver and had a huge pile of unpaid tickets. But somehow, he was never late to a scheduled meeting, no matter what state he was in. Until one day, that changed. A meeting was supposed to start, and he was nowhere to be found. We all thought that was strange, and I joked to a couple of coworkers, “I bet he’s in jail.”
Almost as soon as I said it, the phone rang on one coworker’s desk. He normally never answered unknown numbers, but when he looked at the caller ID, the abbreviated text suggested it was from the county jail. I said, “Called it, he’s making his one phone call.” About 10 seconds later, the other coworker’s phone rang, and he answered.
Turns out my boss had been picked up for sleep-driving while eating a bag of cheese puffs and wearing nothing but a bathrobe. Somehow, that was very on-brand for him.
11. A High Price To Pay
At my last job, I must have been fired 30 or 40 times. Every time, I’d leave knowing my boss would call the next morning, asking me to meet him for breakfast and come back. Most of the time, he’d pay me $100 just to take my old job again. Other times, he’d offer me a raise or a paid day off, both of which were almost unheard of in my industry. You’d think he would have learned to control his temper, but I guess he didn’t mind literally paying for his mistakes.
12. An Honest Day’s Work
Last night, my manager called me stupid and uneducated. The reason was unbelievable. It was because I refused to cheat a customer out of $15 because of a computer error. She seemed to think it was obvious that I should lie about the mistake and squeeze another $15 out of someone in the already struggling hospitality industry. Today I have to go in for a meeting where I’ll probably get criticized for not lying, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up crying.
13. The Perfect Revenge
My first job with the state was awful. My supervisor was incompetent in just about every way. I remember being called into a meeting with our bureau chief, who asked us some questions about office issues. My supervisor outright made up lies about me that went completely against the kind of person I was. I couldn’t keep my frustration in anymore and snapped.
I told my bureau chief I wasn’t there to take part in childish games, then I walked out of the meeting. In the end, I came out ahead and got a promotion that paid twice as much as that terrible supervisor was making. It was one of those satisfying revenge moments where no one got hurt.
14. The Thief Is Coming From Inside The House
When I worked at Circuit City, I had an 80 GB iPod my dad had given me because he didn’t need it anymore. It was basically brand new. The first time I plugged it into my computer, it showed up as “Richard’s iPod.” One day, I had it in my purse under the counter while I was working, and it disappeared. I couldn’t figure out how it had been taken.
It had been one of the slowest days ever, which made it even more confusing. Still, I was really upset about it. At the time, the case where we kept iPods at work was broken, so it was way too easy for people to steal them, and quite a few had already gone missing. A few weeks later, a co-worker told me that my former department manager, who had recently left for another job, thought I was the one stealing iPods.
Apparently, he had gone through my purse when I wasn’t looking and taken mine to check the serial number, but never returned it because I was panicking and making a scene, walking around asking if anyone had seen someone take it. I was furious.
15. Covering His Butt
During a rough period in my life, I worked part-time tech support for a tiny computer shop in town. The owner was unstable, kept a loaded gun in a drawer at the front desk, and regularly cheated customers. One day, I was working when one of the other techs, who had been there forever, told me to go install a modem in a customer’s computer.
I remember shaking my head, because this was 2009 and I couldn’t believe anyone would actually need a modem. I asked if he was sure before I went out there, and he said yes. So I went, and of course the customer didn’t need a modem at all. He needed a wireless card or adapter. I called the shop, went back to get the card, returned to the customer’s place, installed it, then went back and told the guy he’d been a jerk.
Anyone reasonably competent should have known the customer didn’t need a modem. That came back to hurt me. The next week, the boss came in and fired me because the other tech had made up complete nonsense about me drilling a hole in a motherboard to fix a PC, which made absolutely no sense. On my way out, I just rolled my eyes and said, “Fine, whatever.”
I grabbed my things and left. The owner lost it and followed me into the parking lot, yelling and trying to start a fight. I just calmly got into my car, went home, and had a drink. Later, I found out the other tech was caught stealing, and soon after that, the owner went bankrupt. Honestly, I could have seen that coming.
16. Big Swings, Big Misses
Several years ago, I worked at a sporting goods store at the customer service desk. Most of my job involved returns, plus some special tasks with Ticketmaster and hunting and fishing licenses. It wasn’t exactly glamorous, but I liked it because I’m an outdoors person, and the customers were usually fun to talk with. Then one day, we found out we were getting a new general manager.
The old manager was a decent enough guy, though pretty distant. The new one was awful. She seemed to enjoy upsetting employees, didn’t care about customers, made no real improvements to the store, and kept the other managers tied up in endless meetings about “improving” things. After a few months of this—and after watching some of the high school girls she’d hired leave in tears after being yelled at—I’d had enough.
I wrote a pretty polished letter to corporate about her behavior and got several employees to sign it. Two days later, a group of regional executives showed up and gave her a serious reprimand. She was suspended for two weeks and told that if the store didn’t improve by the next quarter, she’d be fired. But that was only the start.
At first, I thought I’d won. I hadn’t. Somehow, she figured out I’d written the letter and decided to get even. She went into the computer system and created fake records making it look like I had been selling gift cards to myself, keeping the cash difference, and then using the cards to buy merchandise. It was mostly small things—candy, soda, and similar items—which she was probably taking herself, since our inventory counts never came up short.
Then she called in loss prevention, who clearly didn’t look very carefully at the records, because they accepted it and called the county sheriff’s office. Two deputies came in and reviewed the evidence. To their credit, they kept asking, “Are you sure?” and “Can you explain this?” and I got the sense they were skeptical about the whole thing.
They were nice about it, too. They offered to take me out through the back instead of walking me past customers, and they were polite and respectful the whole time. Still, things got serious fast. I was arrested on theft charges, taken to jail, booked—the whole process. I cried for almost three days. But I knew it was nonsense, so my parents helped me hire a lawyer.
I told him the full story and made it clear that under no circumstances were we going to plead guilty to anything. He agreed and arranged a meeting with the district attorney to discuss motions and next steps. When we got there, the DA was smiling and very courteous. What he said almost made me laugh. He told me the paperwork wasn’t completely finished yet, but they were dropping all charges against me and filing false report charges against my former manager.
The investigators had reviewed everything and found that: A) nearly three months of the supposed “thefts” had all been edited on just two days, neither of which I had worked, though she had; B) all the edits were made from her computer, which I couldn’t access; and C) several of the alleged thefts happened while the system showed I was out of state on vacation.
I felt a lot better after that, and even better when I found out my former boss had fled the state. She had checked herself into a mental hospital for what she called a nervous breakdown. Eventually, she was brought back, charged, and convicted. The last time I saw her, she was an assistant manager at a gas station. I’m now a federal firefighter and in school. It wasn’t until I saw her there pumping gas that I finally felt I’d really won.
17. A Kindred Spirit
I worked retail for a long time as a cashier at a pet store, and whenever things were slow, I’d sometimes grab a couple of tennis balls and juggle them just to stay entertained. I’m pretty good at it—I can juggle three in all kinds of unusual ways without really looking or thinking about it—so I could still talk to customers normally whenever I needed to.
Most people thought it was funny. If I thought someone wouldn’t, I’d stop before they got close enough to talk, and I’d done it long enough that I was pretty good at reading that. One day, I was bored and juggling while keeping an eye on the front door. A family came in with a few little kids, and they laughed and came over to talk.
We chatted about reptiles and juggling, and I even tried to teach one of their sons—probably five or six—how to juggle after he asked me to. Everyone seemed to have a great time. They went off to shop, with the little boy trying to juggle the mini tennis balls I’d given him. Right after that, I got called into the back by the assistant manager, who decided to really tear into me.
Apparently, he thought I was being disrespectful to customers by juggling instead of giving them my full attention. I respectfully disagreed—possibly with a little sarcasm, I can’t promise otherwise. He looked to the other manager in the room for support, but that guy clearly wanted no part of it and basically had nothing negative to say.
The assistant manager kept going, saying he was going to “work with me” on not being disrespectful and that if it kept happening, we’d need to talk about my job. I left. Then about a month later, a new store manager was hired. He walked up front with the assistant manager and saw me juggling. The assistant manager looked like he was ready to scold me all over again.
But instead, the new store manager laughed, complimented my juggling, grabbed some tennis balls of his own, and started juggling too. The look on the assistant manager’s face was absolutely priceless.
18. On To Bigger, Better Things
About a year after I started working for a company as a designer, my wife became pregnant with our first child. The office was mostly middle-aged women, and since I was in my mid-to-late twenties, everyone was really excited for us. They even threw us a baby shower. Everything went well, and when my son was born, I took two weeks of vacation time to be with my wife and our new baby.
Those were two weeks I had carefully saved up. When I came back, things were completely different. My boss, who had previously been warm and friendly with me, suddenly became distant and barely communicated. That went on for several months until I found out there had been budget cuts and that my position was being eliminated in six months. But that wasn’t the real story.
Through my coworkers, I learned that my boss was upset that I’d had a baby and thought I “wasn’t dedicated to the cause.” She had also been at the budget meeting, and at first there were no planned cuts to our division. Then she singled me out and argued that my work wasn’t essential. So there I was, with a new family, facing unemployment.
Fortunately, another company had been following my work and was eager to hire me. So for the next six months, I didn’t exactly go above and beyond. Now I’m happy in my current job and making more money too. Meanwhile, their company is struggling, and on my way out I took one of their biggest clients with me.
19. A Penny Pincher
A friend of mine used to work for a well-known communications company. One day, the CEO came to visit the office. He went into the break room and counted the supplies. Then he announced that, based on the ratio of coffee to sweetener, employees must be taking sweetener home. As a result, he ordered coffee service to be discontinued in every company office.
20. An Interesting Accusation
I worked at Sears, and I once gave someone 0% financing for six months on their Sears card for a purchase. I believed we were running a promotion at the time, but it turned out we weren’t. Later, they threatened to fire me for stealing, arguing that I had taken money from the company because they might have earned interest if the customer hadn’t paid the balance off.
21. Take An Umbrella, Cause A Ruckus
My friend works at a huge pharmaceutical company in the San Diego office. Since it almost never rains in San Diego, hardly anyone has an umbrella. But on the day of the company Christmas party, it happened to be raining. In the lobby, at the security desk, they keep a set of umbrellas people can borrow if they don’t have one. Problem solved, right?
So my friend borrowed one, went to his car, and drove to the Christmas party. Everyone had a great time. Around 10 p.m., after he left the party, he got a call from his department manager. “Did you take an umbrella?” “What?” “Did you borrow an umbrella from the lobby today?” “Oh… yeah.” “Man, bring the umbrella back.”
He said, “Sure, I’ll return it tomorrow.” He couldn’t believe what his boss said next: “No… I need you to bring it back right now. You have no idea the trouble this has caused.” It turns out the rule with the umbrellas was that you were supposed to return them the same day. Basically, the idea was that you’d take one to your car, then come back in through the front and return it.
Apparently, someone who must have been in a terrible mood needed an umbrella, went to the front desk, and found there weren’t any left. She asked where they had all gone, and the security guard—who was probably having a rough day too—said, “Well, this guy borrowed one hours ago and never brought it back.”
That woman then went into full complaint mode, calling HR, the site manager, my friend’s boss, and anyone else she could think of to protest this violation of the shared umbrella system. Thankfully, calmer heads won out and nothing happened, but for a few hours, my friend borrowing an umbrella was treated like he had stolen top-secret medical research.
22. Slow Your Roll
I used to work part-time as a cake decorator at a Kroger in Little Rock, Arkansas. I never really got proper training for the job, except for how to frost a cake correctly and make a shell border. Everything else I mostly taught myself. I used the art skills I had not just to make shell borders, but also to add art nouveau-style details and even create custom birthday character cakes if the store didn’t have the official kit.
I made some cakes that were genuinely different. One time, I created a “premium” chocolate cake by covering it in chocolate frosting and using malt balls to make grapevine patterns all over it. It sold 15 minutes after I put it in the display case, so I had to make another. And those “cupcake cakes” where a bunch of cupcakes are arranged into a character? I made Goombas and Mario mushrooms out of those.
After I’d been there about three months, the bakery manager pulled me aside and told me the “head cake designer” had complained that I was too slow at making cakes. Because of that, I was being reassigned to stand for seven hours straight making sandwiches until they decided I was fast enough to go back to cakes.
Later, other employees told me it wasn’t really because I was too slow. It was because no one was buying the cakes she was making.
Wikimedia Commons, Michael Prudhomme
23. You’ve Got The Wrong Idea
In high school, I got into a fistfight at a party, and the other guy hit me in the nose. My face wasn’t bruised, so there were no obvious signs anything had happened. I worked at a grocery store, and the next day I was helping my manager pull cases of toilet paper from a high stockroom shelf. I was up on the rack, tossing the cases down to him.
While I was doing that, my nose started bleeding again and dripped onto his spotless white shirt. He got furious, dragged me into his office, and accused me of using drugs at work. He suspended me on the spot. I was also in a school work program, and this almost made me fail that part of the class. But I eventually found a way to fight it.
Luckily, I was in a union and filed a grievance. I got paid for the time I lost, and my grade for the work program was restored. But none of it was simple, and the whole time I was being treated like I was an addict. I spent several nerve-racking weeks wondering whether I’d even be able to graduate, all because this guy jumped to a huge conclusion.
24. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
I was living in Boston then, and the city got hit by a massive snowstorm—a full-on Nor’easter. Still, like the dutiful employee I was, I shoveled out and made my way through the “state of emergency” to struggle up the highway to work. A “state of emergency” means a lot of businesses—and sometimes even the highways—are shut down. Basically, it’s an adult snow day.
When I got there, I just started working, but my manager felt the need to scold me for being 20 minutes late. I gave him a look that basically said, “Really?” and went back to work. That night, I already had plans. I had cleared leaving early with my manager beforehand, and also, I was a salaried employee. So when the end of the day came, I packed up to leave.
It was a whole 30 minutes early. I wanted to head out a little sooner because I knew the snow might make me run late—but also because I knew the company was touchy about people “clocking out early.” So I walked out and started making my way to my car when, of course, my manager came running out after me. He asked why I was leaving early.
I reminded him, as calmly as I could, about my prior plans and the conversation we’d had about it. He said, “Yeah, but you came in late this morning. You need to make up that time or you’re stealing from the company.” I just stared at him, then turned around and left anyway. What a petty person. Unsurprisingly, I don’t work there anymore.
25. Taking A Little Off The Top
I worked at a pricey little supermarket in a very wealthy part of Connecticut. One day I got called to the service desk/floor manager’s office, and it turned out exactly $50 was missing from my till. I hadn’t taken it, and one lower-level manager—who most people didn’t like—actually defended me by pointing out that sometimes bills can stick together.
Even that seemed unlikely, because bills over $20 were supposed to go in the section of the tray with the checks. Anyway, a few weeks later, I had a better sense of how that supermarket operated. At closing, all the till trays went into one big safe, and once the last tray was inside, it got locked immediately. But that same unpopular manager always seemed to take her time at the end of the night when locking the safe and closing the store.
Whenever she did that, within a few days another employee would get pulled aside over a discrepancy. Then I got called into the office again because now $80 was missing, and I got a warning. I quit sometime after that, but the truth eventually came out. It turned out this manager had been dipping into the tills at the end of the night and taking a few bills.
I can’t say exactly how often she did it, but I do know she got caught stealing money that way. Apparently, every few weeks she would also shop at the store where she worked and pay almost nothing. She’d bring in dozens of bottle return receipts and coupons each time. The coupons weren’t the suspicious part.
It was the bottle return slips. Almost all of them were from different times of day and different days of the week. I even recognized some of them. Eventually, she got caught stealing by reusing bottle return receipts from the tills.
26. You Should Have Known Better
At work, they found a girl in the bathroom inhaling hairspray. They checked the security footage and accused me of knowingly selling it to her. I told them I’m not about to ask for ID from people buying hairspray.
27. To Infinity And Below
I was a chemist working for the government. To measure density, we used “pycnometers,” which were fixed-volume containers with a hole for a thermometer. Then we’d do the analysis on an old balance. Basically, it was a clunky setup and a pain to use. We had some extra money in the budget, so I bought an electronic density device for a newer balance.
Anyway, my team leader, who was in his 70s, had no idea how it worked, so he banned me from using it. But he didn’t stop there. He told the lab director I was “making up science with the balances.” The lab director got concerned, walked me into the wet lab, and I showed him how the new equipment would save us hours of work.
I did not get the reaction I hoped for. He just laughed and said, this is the government, what’s the rush? Pretty depressing.
28. Honesty Apparently Isn’t The Best Policy
I work as a television editor. One time, I did a series for a production company and the top people kept telling me how great my storytelling was. After that show ended, they asked me to stay and help edit another series they’d been making for years. On the first day of the new job, the show’s producer asked what I thought of it.
“Do you want my honest opinion?” I asked. “Of course,” she said. So I told her, “It’s too slow, every episode feels the same, and I don’t learn anything about the subject. With a little reshaping, we could make it much more interesting.” I was fired two weeks later because my “editorial pacing” was supposedly off. I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure that producer complained because I criticized her beloved show.
One of the company heads actually had tears in her eyes when she let me go, because I was giving her a real “seriously?” look the whole time. The bright side: my next job doubled my salary and earned me an Emmy for editing. That felt pretty good.
29. It Doesn’t Cut The Mustard
I worked as a shift supervisor at a sandwich shop. One day, a girl came in and ordered several sandwiches. It was obvious they weren’t all for her, because she wasn’t sure what everyone else wanted. At one point, she ordered a sandwich with Dijon mustard. She only said “mustard,” but I’d worked there for years and knew how it usually went.
I asked her more than once if **Dijon mustard** was okay, and she said yes each time. That turned out to be a huge mistake. About 20 minutes later, one of my employees told me there was a customer on the phone asking for a manager. The second I picked up, I heard someone yelling at full volume, “WHY IS THERE DIJON MUSTARD ON MY SANDWICH?”
I asked what he had ordered. He shouted, “I DON’T KNOW, MY DAUGHTER ORDERED IT FOR ME.” I remembered the girl from earlier and said, “Oh, that’s because she ordered the number 8 for you. It comes with Dijon mustard.” He started yelling again: “I DIDN’T WANT DIJON MUSTARD. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ABOUT DINNER?”
At that point, I was stumbling a little, because a grown man was asking me what he should do for dinner. Every time I tried to answer, he cut me off and shouted, “WHAT ABOUT MY DINNER?” So I did the only thing I could think of: I stayed silent. After about 30 seconds, he said in a condescending tone, “Oh, nothing to say, huh?”
I replied, “Sir, if you keep interrupting and yelling at me, I can’t help you.” He hung up. I thought that was the end of it, but then he called back even angrier. “LET ME SPEAK TO THE MANAGER.” “Sir, I am the manager.” “NO YOU’RE NOT, YOU’RE A KID.” “I don’t think my age has anything to do with my ability to run a sandwich shop.” “WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ABOUT MY DINNER? IT’S RUINED.”
I said, “Sir, that’s the sandwich your daughter ordered. I’d be happy to make you a new one if you bring the original back.” “FINE, I WANT IT DELIVERED.” “Sure, where do you live?”
Wherever he lived was way outside our delivery area. So I told him, “Sir, I can’t send our driver that far, but if you come back to the store, I’ll gladly make you a new sandwich.”
From there it was just more incoherent yelling. I called the store owners and warned them that a corporate complaint was probably coming my way. I explained what happened. They laughed and told me, “Good job.” For the rest of the night, I kept expecting some furious man with a grudge against Dijon mustard to burst through the door and confront me. I also felt bad for his daughter.
30. Looking For Trouble
When I was 16, I worked at McDonald’s. I always volunteered for the early weekend shift because no one else wanted it. So I’d show up at 5:30 a.m. to help open the store. One morning, while I was getting ready for work, I got a phone call at 5:00 a.m. The manager was reviewing my timecards.
Apparently, six months earlier, I had taken a 26-minute lunch break instead of a 30-minute one, which violated company policy. I explained that the store had been extremely busy and my manager had asked me to clock back in early to help during the lunch rush. The manager on the phone said, “Doesn’t matter.”
“You should have known the rules, and if someone asks you to break one, you should know better than to do it. We can’t employ someone who knowingly breaks company policy.” And just like that, I was fired with less than 30 minutes’ notice. The real reason made it even worse. Since I’d been working there since I was 14, I was due for a sizable raise once I hit the two-year mark, and they wanted me gone before that happened.
31. The Cards Are Stacked Against You
I was fired for being late to work. But here’s the part that mattered: during the holidays, they’d schedule me for a 12-hour shift and then expect me back just five hours later. My commute was 30 minutes each way, so even in the best-case scenario, I’d get maybe three hours of sleep—and that was only if I fell asleep right away. They did this more than once.
I really did try to get back on time, but I’d usually end up anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour late. I still always finished the work that needed to be done.
32. Putting The Passive In Aggressive
An old boss of mine fired me by leaving a note under my windshield wiper. He always avoided confrontation, which is not exactly a great quality in a boss, but that was a whole new low.
33. No Sweater Weather For You
I once got yelled at, like I was a little kid, in front of my coworkers for about three minutes. And to this day, I still don’t understand why. It was because I was wearing a sweater. My boss claimed I was using it to trigger my allergies and make myself sneeze. I have no idea what sneezing was supposed to do for me, but that was the accusation. Keep in mind, this was in Hawaii, where office AC seems to have only two settings: broken or freezer. You can probably guess which one ours was on.
She got demoted a month later and transferred, so at least the story has a happy ending.
34. Working Hard Or Hardly Working?
I used to work for the city, and honestly, it was one of the most frustrating jobs I’ve ever had. I was constantly told I was working too hard and needed to slow down. The older guys didn’t want to look bad while they sat around all day making gross comments about girls way too young for them, so they’d get annoyed at me for actually doing my job.
I almost got fired a few times because of it. It made the days drag on forever, and it made me furious.
35. One Giant Headache
My general manager once accused me of stealing toilet paper because I had a cold and was blowing my nose in the bathroom after I ran out of tissues. That was literally the whole reason. The same manager also threw a stapler at my head once, just to give you an idea of what kind of person he was. I probably should have reported him and gotten him fired, but I was just glad to leave.
36. One Button For All Your Woes
Many years ago—back in the late ’80s—there was another recession, and I ended up taking what felt like the most basic job possible just to pay rent: data entry. The company used IBM terminals. My job was to take a paper invoice, type all the details into the computer version of the handwritten form, and then send it along for the next step in the process.
Because everything was being done for one location, there were three or four pieces of information that were always the same on every form. So I came up with what I thought was a great idea. The terminal had simple macro features, so I set one function key to automatically fill in those repeated details and move the cursor to the first line where I actually needed to type.
It made the job much easier. But one morning my supervisor saw me doing it and completely panicked. She started yelling that I was doing something wrong and refused to listen to any explanation. Before I knew it, I was being formally written up for “reprogramming the mainframe computer” and dragged in front of the division vice president and the IT manager to explain myself.
So I did. They both looked at my supervisor, and the IT manager said, “This is basically like setting the tab key on a typewriter for a form.” Then he gave her a long, uncomfortable look before walking out with the vice president. The two of us were left sitting there in silence. Finally, she just said, “Go back to work,” and hurried out of the room.
After that, I never had another issue with her. In fact, I don’t think she ever said more than a couple of words to me again—or even looked my way.
37. And That’s The Tea
I had worked in a café for about three years when my very lovely boss sold it to someone I can only describe as the most exhausting person I’ve ever met. The new owner managed to lose about 80% of the regular customers within a month, all while lowering quality and raising prices. She turned the café into a tea shop and bought incredibly—and I mean incredibly—expensive new dishes and decorations.
Most of the crockery was antique and extremely fragile, which made no sense at all in a café where things need to be sturdy. Then there was me: hardworking, sincere, friendly... and unbelievably clumsy. The first time I experienced her anger was when I broke a $40 cup while trying to wash it quickly. We were busy and short-staffed, and of course her antique tea sets were too delicate for the dishwasher, so the waitstaff had to wash them by hand.
Over the course of about a year, she hired and quickly fired around 15 staff members, both servers and kitchen workers. She would hire people, build up a fantasy in her head about what they should be like, and then when they didn’t match it, she would yell at them in front of customers and tell them to get out of her sight. At one point, she made me “Saturday supervisor.”
I was only there for an eight-hour Saturday shift to earn a bit of extra money, and a lot of customers came in specifically to see me. Still, she constantly overruled my decisions and deliberately made me look foolish and slow in front of customers. When the last chef walked out, she had to go into the kitchen, and I was left running front of house with no extra training.
The two staff members working under me—which already wasn’t enough—usually stayed only two or three weeks, and many had no serving experience at all. It was a complete nightmare. I often went home in tears, and when the owner once bumped into the back of my dad’s car and didn’t apologize, I had to physically stop him from confronting her right there in the street.
She actually told me the reason her business was failing was my “inability to cater to customers’ needs” and that the service I provided was “downright terrible.” Completely untrue. I only worked there eight hours on Saturdays. During the summer, she put me in charge of takeaway service, which I was terrible at, and I told her that repeatedly.
When she finally fired me, she said she couldn’t let me hold her back anymore and that I only ever did half a job. Then she listed tasks I had supposedly failed to do—tasks no one had ever told me were mine. In fact, most of them were things she should have been doing herself. She had no idea what she was doing. I tried to tell her how I felt, but I was so upset and frustrated that all I could do was cry.
The business closed two weeks later. Now I work in a similar job, where I’m often praised for my skills as a waitress, and I’m looking forward to being promoted quickly.
38. Facing The Music
I was once accused of “bringing down” my entire department of more than 40 people because of what management called “excessive internet usage.” Here’s the story, because it was ridiculous. My company was very strict about which websites employees could and couldn’t visit. Apparently, every time you visited a site that wasn’t work-related, it was logged, along with how much bandwidth it supposedly wasted.
Some sites were blocked completely, especially anything involving video streaming, gambling, and so on. Up until last year, I had a Sirius radio subscription that included online access. One day I decided to see whether I could stream it at work. To my surprise—and delight—not only could I access the site, but the radio stream worked too.
So for two straight weeks, I streamed Sirius all day during my eight-hour shifts. Then came the Monday after those two weeks, and everything fell apart. I got a call from the head of my department asking me to come to her office. I assumed it couldn’t be too serious, since we talked pretty regularly.
Right before heading over, I tried to log in to Sirius again, but it no longer worked. In fact, I couldn’t even access the site at all. I didn’t think much of it until I got to the meeting. Apparently, the company’s chief technology officer had contacted my department head and told her that I was the number one offender for non-work-related internet use that month.
It turned out I had used 2.8 gigs of bandwidth just streaming music. I got a very serious lecture and was told that my actions had not only hurt me, but also caused problems for the whole department. I was even told the department was lucky to still exist after what I’d done, and that if she had her way, I wouldn’t still be employed there.
Fortunately, the only actual punishment was being placed on final warning—the third and last step before termination—and having my non-work internet access blocked for a month. But less than a week later, I transferred to a different department, and the written warning disappeared. Needless to say, my boss was not happy.
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39. Don’t Put The Blame On Me
I worked at a pizza place for about two months before quitting. I wasn’t especially good at the job, but on top of that, the owners blamed me for the most random things. We marked order tickets with a “K” or “Q” for King- or Queen-sized pizzas. One time, customers ordered a King, but the cooks accidentally made a Queen. The owner told everyone it was my fault because I had “used the wrong pen” on the ticket.
I finally quit because the cooks moved a ticket into the “in the oven” section before they had actually made it. It was an honest mistake. But my family happened to be in the restaurant that day and overheard the owners telling the customers that it was my fault because I had put the ticket in the wrong place. When I asked the owner whether she had said that, she denied it. I quit on the spot.
I made good money there, but it was an awful experience.
40. It’s A Dog-Eat-Dog World Out There
I worked at Office Depot as a salesperson. What a lot of people may not realize about stores like that—or really any place that sells electronics—is that many of those electronics are sold as loss leaders. At Office Depot, if we sold a laptop at regular price, there was a good chance the store actually lost about 10% on the sale. So if we sold one for $500, the store might lose $50.
So how does that business model work? Protection plans. Customers buy a plan that can cost nearly half as much as the laptop itself, and in many cases it’s basically useless—even for the roughly one-third of customers who even remember they bought it. Working in that position meant you could never really win.
Maybe one out of five customers buying a laptop would also buy the protection plan. Two others would buy only the laptop, and I’d get criticized for not offering the plan often enough. According to Office Depot, a customer hadn’t really said “no” until they’d been offered something five times. Other times I’d get in trouble for steering someone toward a lower-cost laptop that was a smaller loss for the store, especially if it was handled off the books.
Another customer might agree to the lower-priced option, and then I’d get criticized again for not selling the protection plan. Then the fifth customer would demand to speak to a manager, who would publicly yell at me for pushing the plan too hard. There was also an ongoing practice where, if you knew a sale was going to be handled off the books, you would tell the customer your store was out of stock but another nearby location had it.
I refused to do that—and thankfully so, because the store later got into serious trouble over that practice—but I was still criticized for it almost every day. It was also easy to tell when another store did it to us, because we could see every store’s inventory on our computers. There was no way to come out ahead. If we were truly out of stock—which happened often because the other store pulled this all the time—I got blamed by the customer. If we did have it in stock, I got blamed for a sale another employee had just pushed onto me.
Then the manager would yell at me for not explaining to the customer what the other store had done. One time I told a customer that we were actually out of stock and that the other store had five units available... and I nearly got fired.
41. You Had One Job
I work in sales, and one of my coworkers, who was pretty suspicious of everyone, accused me of processing returns on his sales and then moving those sales onto my account. It was completely false—and really, he was trying to distract from a bigger problem. He was trying to protect his image after realizing that a lot of his customers were returning items because he had done such a poor job helping them with sizes, colors, and other details.
He was fired not long afterward for poor performance.
42. Not A Temporary Grudge
Not long ago, I was assigned to a one-day temp job through People Bank in Toronto. I arrived early, but when I got there, they told me they didn’t actually have any work for me and sent me home. Then the agency emailed me claiming I had shown up late, and because of that they were only going to pay me for half a day. I explained that a) I arrived early, and the person who hired me was the one who was late, and b) I had written confirmation that if they sent me home, I’d still be paid for the full day.
They reluctantly agreed. Then, as if to “make it up to me,” they assigned me to three weeks of moving banker’s boxes around, and since then they seem to have stopped offering me work. This was an agency I’d had a relationship with for 12 years, both as an employee and as a contractor.
43. Take A Square, Leave A Square
Office managers—you’ve got to love them. I work in a small office, and we also have a second office across the street that’s even smaller. Whenever supplies came in—paper towels, toilet paper, soap, and so on—someone from the other office would just come over and take what they needed. One day, our office manager hadn’t ordered enough toilet paper, and when she was getting ready to leave that afternoon, she noticed that all the toilet paper she had bought was gone.
She went back to her desk and sent an email saying, basically, that someone was stealing the toilet paper. What had really happened was that people from the office across the street had come by and taken most of it for their own office. My boss and everyone else got a good laugh out of it. A few weeks later, he asked me to hang up a picture. I went to the supply closet for nails and couldn’t find any.
I got some elsewhere, then told him we were out. He immediately sent our office manager an email saying that someone had been taking nails and that he wanted her to figure out what was going on. Some people never learn.
44. In The Eye Of The Beholder
My supervisor told me I shouldn’t wear jeans—meaning the “jeans” I had on. There was just one problem: I was wearing brown khakis. I said exactly that. They were brown cotton pants, clearly made like khakis—not even close to jeans. She said that because other people had complained and insisted they were jeans, she had to bring it up with me.
45. Getting Their Wires Crossed
I briefly worked at a cooking school, doing admin work during the day and helping with classes in the evening. The owner was very old-school and stubborn, and had no interest in updating how he did anything. One bank holiday, I was working even though no one was calling to book classes because everyone assumed we were closed.
I was sorting dishes and putting them away when my boss called across the room that he was heading out for lunch and that I could go home once I finished. Great, I thought—I was bored out of my mind. I finished up and left. On my way out, I passed him on the stairs and cheerfully said I was done with everything and was heading home.
He looked a little confused and said okay. The next morning, he called and asked, “What happened yesterday?” I started thinking through every phone call I’d taken the day before, wondering if I had missed some problem with a customer. I couldn’t think of anything, so I asked what he meant. His answer completely surprised me.
He said, “Why did you leave?” I told him it was because he had said I could go home once I finished my work. He said no, he had never said that. I apologized and said I must have misheard him. But then it got even more ridiculous. He just kept insisting, over and over, that he never said it and that I was making it up, even though he claimed he had more work for me that afternoon.
He told me to come into the office later. By then I was confused and angry, because had he never heard of a simple misunderstanding? And if he really had more work for me, why didn’t he say anything when he saw me leaving on the stairs? When I got there, he told me very seriously that he had thought about it and had decided to let me go because I was “a liar” and he couldn’t have someone untrustworthy working for him.
I told him that was fine, because I didn’t want to work for someone so inflexible that he couldn’t imagine his own words being misunderstood.
46. Life Isn’t So Sweet
At my old job, I worked at a candy store. There were a lot of reasons I left, but mostly I felt like I’d outgrown it. I was 18, and it really felt more like a job for younger teens. On top of that, my boss didn’t seem to understand what being a boss actually involved. She’d complain about having to come in, and then complain that “no one told her” when something was broken—even though we had texted her about it.
She also clearly wanted an all-female staff, with the only exception being her nephew, who worked there for about a month. She used to say, “Boys don’t know how to do anything.” In general, she really didn’t seem to know how to run the place. One of the worst things was that she constantly overordered supplies and then “forgot” to pay the fee for the delivery person to bring everything inside. That meant we’d spend an hour hauling huge boxes in from down the street ourselves.
The ice cream and candy shipments would often arrive on the same day, which made things even more stressful. Me and two other girls were basically the only employees who knew how to properly open and close, clean, stock candy, and handle the store in general. We worked hard trying to get the other girls to help, but they usually sat in the back and ignored customers.
I opened the store a lot, so I’d come in to find everything trashed and have to spend an hour cleaning before I could even start the day. Meanwhile, my boss kept blaming the wrong people, so most of us older girls ended up quitting. The ones left were 16 or younger. I honestly hope she realizes why the place turned into such a mess, because you can’t show up once a week and expect a bunch of teenagers to run a store alone. I’m so glad I left.
47. Gonna Be Hard No
One time, I traveled to LA with my boss. We were having drinks at the hotel bar pretty early in the evening. He got tipsy fast and started talking to a woman who looked like she was there hoping to meet a man and go upstairs with him for money. That’s when things got uncomfortable. The problem was that his son had come to LA to visit him and was already asleep in my boss’s hotel room upstairs.
So what was his solution? He asked me—his employee, and someone 30 years younger than him—if he could “use my room.”
48. I’ll Believe It When I See It
At one point in one of my jobs, my boss became convinced I was wasting time in the restroom. His solution? For a few months, he wouldn’t let me flush the toilet until he came in and confirmed I had actually used it. Like I was a little kid.
49. It’s Payback Time
Back in high school, I worked for my town’s parks department. One day, my boss—who was a complete creep and seemed to dislike me mostly because I wasn’t female—called me into his office. Once I was there, he accused me of taking a $3 check and told me I had to be fired. I told him straight out that if I were going to steal from the department, it definitely wouldn’t be for something as pointless as a three-dollar check.
Seriously, what would I even do with that? Later, a friend told me the boss found the check under his desk. Then about a month later, someone finally reported him for harassment, and he got fired too. Karma worked fast.
50. Something Smells Fishy Here
I was once accused of leaving a note on a coworker’s desk that said, “your desk smells like onions.” Management treated it like serious harassment because the employee said she felt intimidated by it. They even did a handwriting analysis—done by management themselves—and decided I was one of two possible matches. I didn’t do it, and I definitely lost some respect for management that day.
