I had one, but I didn’t realize what it was until later.
I had a micromanaging bitch for a boss. I eventually transferred out of the department, but she had me so rattled I lost confidence in my ability to make decisions.
One morning, she’s bustling busily about between her office and the general manager’s office. I’m doing my work when she calls me into her office.
It turns out two employees had gotten into a fistfight on the property the night before. They were both fired, and she needed me to make calls to get the security code changed, locks changed, etc.
I was shocked, because we were a very small company, such that you could tell who was here by looking at the cars in the parking lot. I expressed shock and dismay, and she arches an eyebrow and says,
“You knew about this already, didn’t you?”
See, I was very chummy with a department director she didn’t like. We’d go to lunch, and she had told me that it was inappropriate for he and I to be friends. She asked me to note when he was coming in in the morning, I guess to dock his pay, until the GM told her to knock it off. He was a stellar employee, smart as a whip, and she was just trying to stir up trouble. Anyway, she thought I’d heard about the fight from my friend and that I had faked my reaction to her.
I’m not offended. This happened eight plus years ago, and was just one instance in a long line of her silliness. She was my boss, and she thought that my :eek: when she told me about the two employees was a faked reaction. It just didn’t occur to me until much later.
Back in the day I was the lone punk rocker in a town of 5000 and home of the most inept police force on the planet. If anything happened and I was within a mile of the crime scene I was the first suspect on the list. Once they even pulled me over while I was riding a bicycle. Ok here is the list:
Arson/escaping from police custody
Breaking and Entering
Breaking into cars
Vandalizing cars
Vandalizing houses
Vandalizing businesses
Vandalizing boats
Breaking into boats(I actually know who did this. I drank the fruits of their labors later that night, All they did was sneak onto boats in the harbor and take booze)
Selling drugs
Buying drugs
Being on drugs
and my favorite…
Planning to start a riot/brawl after a football game with the opposing team’s fans. This was after I had left high school, and had never given a damn about football when I was in school.
I didn’t mean to hit reply. I was going to add that I try never to be alone with a woman that I don’t know. I don’t want to walk too close to one on the street going the same way.
Sometimes I will stand in a longer line at the store if it feels “safer” in that respect as well.
I broke up with a boyfriend years ago, but remained pretty friendly with him and his family. His brother in law told him (for some strange macho reason, I suppose)that he had slept with me over the previous summer.
I remember driving house to house with my ex, looking for the guy. I was so frustrated that he dared to lie. I was so pissed!
We finally found the idiot and I asked him to describe me - naked. Since we never were intimate he couldn’t discuss a distinguishing feature that a lover would have known and my ex finally realized his BIL was an egotistical liar.
Those feelings of being accused while innocent were painful. I’m getting angry now in the retelling.
I was accused of rape my senior year of college. I had been on and off dating this girl during the year, and we had just started getting kind of serious. She had decided she was going to stay a virgin, which I was fine with. One night we had messed around a bit, but not too far. She got kind of mad at herself for going farther than she had planned, and I walked her home. No big deal, I thought.
Turns out she went back to her room, and her ex-boyfriend was there with her roommate. Her ex- that hated me. Her roommate, who didn’t like me either. She was crying a bit, and they asked her what was up. She told them what happened, and they convinced her she’d been raped.
Two days later, after wondering why I hadn’t talked to her, I get a phone call from Student Services asking me to come in. I go, and they tell me all about it. I mention “You do know everything we did was consensual? And that we didn’t have sex?” It got real quiet in the room. They called her, and she confirmed. The whole thing was dropped after that. Lovely part of it: I was told I couldn’t talk about it after the fact. She could, and had. Her friends could, and had. But I couldn’t defend myself. Yeah, that was a lot of fun.
Nothing as serious as a rape accusation but in senior year of high school I was accused of plagiarizing my major O.A.C English paper. For those unfamiliar with Ontario high school programs in the early 90’s the grade you received in your O.A.C classes determined whether or not you got into university. So it was a pretty big deal to a high school kid. The school administration said they thought the paper was written at a level beyond that of a high school student so I must have had someone else write it for me. Luckily my entire family had watched me struggle for two weeks to write this essay and I had kept all my rough drafts. I was in the habit of hand writing most of my work at that time and then typing it into Word later. So when I showed up for the big meeting with the Principal, my teacher and the department head I was well prepared. They were very surprised to see me come in with my entire family and reams of coffee stained rough drafts proving that I had indeed written the paper. The teacher grudgingly agreed to accept the paper and then only gave me an 80%! The best part was I had used the word “precipitate” in the context of King Claudius’ death being the trigger for Hamlets madness. The teacher circled the word and wrote the comment, “Doesn’t this mean rain?!?” All my friends still laugh off asses off about that one!
Sort of. I worked in the front office of a hotel and had a co-worker that everybody there suspected of being a thief. Unfortunately she was black and had a history of filing suits against other employers who fired her on charges of racism. (Poor thing; it seems she worked for every openly racist employer in Montgomery judging by the times she got fired due to racism; black co-workers hated her more than whites because she’s the type of person who makes real allegations of racism seem contrived.)
One night when I was working with her I let her do the drop of the day’s cash. It was about $100, and while technically the supervisor was supposed to do the drop himself/herself it was literally never done because that would require leaving the desk to go to where the safe was kept and the supervisor was always more needed on the desk on busy nights, but every supervisor there let the desk clerks do the drop including mine when I was a clerk.
The drop never got made. “Pat”, the thieving employee, swore that I never gave it to her. She was written up because I was witnessed giving it to her, but then there was an investigation and she accused me of stealing it and called her lawyer (an asshole [white, in case you’re wondering] who made his living with annoyance suits against large companies) and the company brought in theirs and ultimately the missing $100 probably cost several thousand in flying corporate investigators down from the company’s office in D.C. and legal fees, etc… I was written up for “suspicious behavior” or some such, refused to sign it and literally quit on the spot, furious that they would question my honesty when they knew me. (My supervisor did not want to and he knew it was Pat- everybody knew it was Pat- but he was under orders.)
Two days later he called and asked me to come back, dropping the write-up and all, and basically the whole matter was treated as an “I don’t know what happened” thing (even though we did). Since I liked most of my co-workers and certainly didn’t work just for my health I returned. Pat was eventually fired for stealing gift certificates to the hotel chain and giving them to her friends and family members who when they were caught (the certificates were numbered and reported as stolen) were all traceable to her (her brother, someone known to be her friend, etc.). She sued but the company’s attorney made such a fool of her in court that her own lawyer ended up laughing at her (after which she went to work for the State Dept. of Education as a teacher’s aid because the company never filed charges and gives the same “she worked here from X to X” reference for everybody).
[hijack]It was always unbelievable how many people I knew in the hospitality industry who were fired for the most gross incompetence or drug use or stealing or sexual harassment or other major and well documented offenses who never went a day without work. You’d see them fired at company 1 and the next thing you hear is they started work at company 2, often in a better position. I know that most companies only give the generic “yes he worked here” reference but you’d think they’d have an “off the record” network or at least notice that he’d abruptly left without another job lined up six times in the last year and a half.[/hijack]
The only other false accusation of sorts I ever had was a co-worker who for some reason known to her and the gods thought I was in love with her and making overtones and asked my boss to tell me (not in the form of a complaint but a “could you please tell him as a friend”) that she was not interested. (She wasn’t afraid of me or anything, she just wanted it known that she had a boyfriend and didn’t like me “in that way”.) Once my boss stopped laughing she relayed the message.
This must be widespread in the hospitality industry. My boss at the hotel where I worked was a lunatic bitch. She would say outrageously nasty things to the guests, and when they complained to the coporate office would give a bemused laugh, “My goodness! Can you actually imagine anyone saying that?” and they would buy it. She only got nailed for it once, and that was for a minor incident.
She also would try to start fights amongst the staff by telling people that others were talking about them. She was eternally frustrated because we all got along and would ask, “Hey, did you say this about me to Tammy?” instead of flying off in a rage. She once accused a housekeeper of theft and had her strip-searched by the police when in fact, nothing was missing. She just didn’t like the girl.
We had huge turn-over of course, and housekeepers tend to move on to other motels. You’d think word would have spread about her to the point where she wouldn’t be able to get a job in this town 'cause no one would want to work with her, but, no, when our hotel was sold, she went on to another one with no difficulties.
In my sophomore year of high school I had an ADD specialist with bad breath (they always love to get real close when they talk, too, so you can enjoy the experience and try not to puke) and a terrible math teacher. I was having a lot of trouble in the class (despite being a demonstrably excellent math student otherwise) as there was no guidance, oversight or teaching whatsoever. My specialist insisted to me that I wasn’t turning in homework in the class because I didn’t like my teacher because she was black. Well, first it was a question: “Is it because she’s African-American?” That was honestly the weirdest thing I’d heard all year and I said “What? No, of course not.” She kept badgering me and got more and more insistent. She created a prejudice for me and insisted I had it! There was no evidence whatsoever, except that I was white and the teacher was black. Thanks for assuming, good-for-nothing specialist asshole (who was white, FWIW)–you’re far more racist than I could ever be. Hey, maybe I’m not turning in homework because she’s not showing me how to do it? God damn!
Once when I was five (liking this already?), my mom had gone upstairs to take a shower. “Don’t run any water!” It’s an old house and any change in water pressure makes the shower throw a hissy-fit.
Well. Mom came down stairs in a fury. “Didn’t I tell you NOT to run any water?” she yelled. I hadn’t, honest and for true. I was coloring, or playing with blocks or eating Play-Do or something. Well, someone had run the water, and since dad wasn’t there, obviously it *had * to be me. I was sent to my room (in tears, of course) for lying. And yet I knew I was right.
A few hours later, the phone rang. It was the local water utility, explaining that morning there had been a pipe burst up the street, but repairs had been completed and they hoped it hadn’t been too great an inconvenience.
When I was around 14 there was another kid that rode my bus and lived about 2 miles from us that I didn’t get along with at all. He and I were always scrapping.
One day a sheriff’s deputy pulled up to our house and asked where I had been the night before, which was home. Mom and Dad (who was a corporal with the same Sheriff’s Dep’t.) backed me up. The family of the kid that I always fought with accused me of sneaking into their shed and killing a dozen pet rabbits.
I was shocked, and even more so when it turned out it was their neighbor’s dog that was the culprit. Did they really think I was capable of the kind of savagery that a dog attacking and tearing apart rabbits would do?
I was working as an assistant to a surveyor (unskilled labor; “walk off in that direction until I tell you to stop. OK stop! Now stick that rail spike in the dirt and hold that stick until I tell you. OK, just stay there while I walk around you and shoot back to you from the other side. OK, now walk past me and off in that direction…”).
So I’d been doing that for a month, decent pay for unskilled, when one morning I’m asked to come into the office and sit down and they accuse me of deliberately mucking around with the stake between one “shoot” and the next, so as to deliberately make the initial reading not tally with the final one, requiring them to do it all over from scratch. Oh, and “he saw you do it”.
WTF? Umm, no…and what would be my motivation?
“You figured that in that way you would prolong the job and get more money from us in the long run”
It could not conceivably be the case that the surveyor was CYA’ing when his months’ results didn’t add up correctly? C’mon, what’s the more likely scenario here?
I found it very upsetting at the time, especially as it was a small town and I was afraid word would get around and no one would hire me.
Going back all the way to high school, I worked for a full year for a pharmacist, at the less-than-minimum-wage rate of $2/hour in '76-'77. I didn’t have a job description, so he had me doing everything: restocking shelves, operating the cash register, tarring his damn roof in midsummer (subtract one complete change of clothing including shoes from income), sweeping up the parking lot, etc. He was one of those guys who things the best way to manage employees is to complain constantly. It was my first job (aside from lawn mowing and baby-sitting) and I wasn’t accustomed to being looked askance at, in fact I was accustomed to being praised as excellent and diligent, so it was pretty miserable. But the clincher was when he fired me, stating that I was stealing candy and things like that from behind the cash register area.
A pair of lesbians accused me of being homophobic after I waited on them. I have no idea why they said it and it really pissed me off because I am a huge activist for gays rights. I was also called racist for turning down a guy who happened to be Asian. The funny this is, I prefer Asian guys!
I was accused of beating my daughter.
Picking her up from pre-school, her teacher stopped me at the gate (where all the other parents were coming in, so they all got to hear about it too. My girl had fallen in the playground and hurt her head. For some reason, the teacher decided to question her about home discipline (the very occasional smack on the bum as they very last resort, after warnings.) After a while, she had got my daughter to say that I had hit her hard in the head - the teacher was concerned about this.
I got my girl home, checked her bump (from the playground fall) and asked her to tell me her version of events.
The teacher was supposed to be supervising. My girl had got up on some equipment that she knew was out of bounds. She had fallen and was very upset and felt guilty. The teacher had told her it was her own fault that she was hurt and started asking what I would have done to punish her, and kept asking and asking, suggesting possible things that I might do.
The next day I saw the head teacher and explained the whole situation to her. Nothing was ever done. No apology - and I found out later from other parents that this bitch made a habit of this. Always after a child had been hurt. It was her way of deflecting blame from herself.
Still angry.
when she told me about the two employees was a faked reaction. It just didn’t occur to me until much later.