Share your stories of being disrespected/abused/shat upon by your employers

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have dozens of such stories, but here is the one that prompted this thread:

About 10 years ago, I was a consultant at a software firm. I made a pretty decent living, and was salaried. This meant, of course, that they could ask me to work long hours and never pay me overtime. On one particular project, we routinely had to do gruntwork long into the night, including Saturdays and Sundays. I could tell from the beginning that what we were doing was never going to benefit the project in any way, so it was long hours of useless tedium. And it was during the summer, the season where I enjoy my free time the most.

The project had some dozen people working, 9 of which were managers and 3 of us worker bees. The worst manager was Trevor. He had the habit of announcing, at 5pm on Fridays, “You guys are going to need to stay late tonight. Oh, and I need you to work a 12 hour day tomorrow. Sunday as well. I’ll see you on Monday. I’m off to the Hamptons.”

10 years later, I still want to punch the guy.

So anyway, I tried to salvage one last bit of summer. I scheduled a week-long vacation for the week before Labor Day. I wasn’t going anywhere (who the hell had time to plan for a hotel room?), but I had summer activities planned – swimming and sailing. It was my last chance. After Labor Day, those things would no longer be options.

So mid-afternoon on the Friday before, Trevor called me into his office. “We want to thank you for all the hard work you’ve been putting in, and we’d like to show our appreciation by giving you a bonus of $100, and we appreciate the effort you will be putting in next week. You’ll need to postpone your vacation by a week.” I basically told him to keep his measly $100, my vacation was already approved, and he couldn’t stop me. I welcomed him to fire me if he felt he must.

What burns me the most about this is that for all of the overtime that I put in, the reward that was offered to me was, by my calculations, about 21 cents per hour. And this was called “appreciation.”

Trevor, if you’re reading this, I’m glad you got fired. And no, it wasn’t because of your “gay lifestyle.” It’s because you were a really bad manager. And a jerk.

2

I work in a support role for academic biomedical research, being disrespected, abused and shat upon sums up a lot of my career! :stuck_out_tongue:

The last lab I worked for, I left for many reasons:

  1. One of the post-docs was sexually harassing me. Since he was from another country, I was told that his behavior was because of cultural differences and I should just ignore him. * He’s lived here for 10 years!! He should have learned to keep his hands to himself.*
  2. One of my primary projects lead to this paper. The photos are my work, the statistical information is from a spreadsheet I maintained, and I prepared the cells for the flow cytometry analysis. I had to fight tooth and nail to be listed as an author on this paper!! The PI didn’t want to list me because I didn’t have a degree - the ass.
  3. When I accepted a position with another lab, this PI asked my new PI if he could keep me for another couple of weeks to finish up some projects! He didn’t ask me if I wanted to stay!

I think the phd is actually latin for SOB.

3

A co-worker stuck his hand down the back of my pants. I went to management. The guy admitted it. They didn’t fire him because he was an important part of the contract team.

4

I moved over to a new project (with an already shitty company) to an exceptionally shitty manager. I really wanted the project change but I swiftly regretted it. This manager had wowed people into the job and now decided to kick back and enjoy it. He hired another person at my level who was unqualified and well known for being a total waste of space in his current position. We swiftly found out that this was because they were both gay, and entered into a relationship (which they ardently denied). My job was basically to do both jobs so that new employee could basically not work. Oh, and they would swap hardcore porn images back and forth during the day on work computers, and have lots of private closed-door meetings. Over time, I ended up doing the manager’s job to a large degree as well.

When I started to kick up a fuss about it, nobody would listen. Finally, it took about six months of them flaunting their relationship and tanking the project before they said word one about the problems, and the suck-ass employee quit. The manager took it out hard on me and the others who had called him out on it. He basically stopped doing anything at all, except for calling us into his office every day, so we ran the department without him. We literally had two staff meetings - one with him where he would yell and bitch at us for hours, and another meeting without him where we would get things done.

Several months later, my manager was fired (for the porn thing, I found out) after much heel-dragging from his manager - it took the computer technician who found all the porn threatening him with going to upper management about it.

I applied for the new manager opening but was told I didn’t understand the job well enough and that he didn’t know if my performance was good enough (code: the upper manager making the decision was a complete slackjaw who didn’t know what was going on well enough to gauge my performance). This was despite the fact that, during my manager’s copious absences, I was attending manager meetings in his place and taking care of business.

They brought in an offsite manager who promptly started treating me like an infant. I got a new job and refused to negotiate with them on salary, and left quickly.

After I left, the upper manager who denied me promotion was fired shortly thereafter. Oh, and when we were cleaning out my manager’s office, we found lots of condoms and lube. :mad:

5

A Walgreens pharmacy manager who I worked for a couple years ago as a pharmacy technician was widely acknowledged, by males and females, young and old, as a world-class dick. He had a low opinion of females in general, and of female pharmacy technicians in particular, referring to them disparagingly as “the girls”, no matter how much seniority they had or how good they were at their job, and occasionally throwing in a nasty, sneering innuendo or two.

So a couple weeks ago he asked a college girl pharmacy tech who was graduating and moving on if her next job “would include a pole”.

She reported him to Corporate for sexual harassment.
And they fired his ass outta there–just came in one day and took his license off the pharmacy wall and escorted him out of the building.

And there was great rejoicing.

6

My first job in the US was at Sears. I don’t mind telling you this, because they deserve whatever awaits them for the way they treated me and other employees who didn’t wait around for the cigarette afterward.

When I started and filled out all my forms, I asked them to take an extra $10 a week out of my pay for taxes. I came to find out that the total amount of tax they were taking out of my check was $10. And they would not change it, or tell me how to change it. The first year my wife and I had to pay joint taxes, we owed thousands of dollars, and got charged a couple hundred by H&R Block to sort it out. It took several years for us to get out from under that incurred debt, even with the IRS extension payment plan.

I was working there when I got my green card. I had booked a flight back to Canada for a week. When it came up, they told me I couldn’t go. I told them to just try to revoke my earned vacation. They said I was putting my personal life before my responsibilities to the company. I told them to get stuffed, and to just try to find some legal means of preventing me from going. It was after this that they started making me really miserable. They wouldn’t approve any of the dozens of requests for a transfer to another department, and they wouldn’t promote me.

Then they hired the girl from the perfume department to be the HR director and things at the store went further downhill. I wrote a letter to the GM, my department heads and the regional manager, outlining the kind of treatment I was no longer willing to put up with and why, and I quit to go work at my current job.

I found out later that the GM got fired for incompetence, and the HR person was caught stealing from the company. I saw one of these management goons once, as I was walking through the mall. He tried to avoid me by ducking into Hot Topic. Yeah, like he was a regular customer there. I mentioned in another thread that this was the worst job I’ve ever had, and I never dreaded going in to work anywhere before my experience with Sears.

7

Apparently my current employer thinks I’m some kind of sell-out who can be bought off with a managerial title and responsibilities, six-figure salary and a 10% bonus. The audacity!
As someone who’s been more or less fired from about half of the jobs I’ve ever had since I started working, I feel that it’s never worth putting up with abusive crap just to hold on to a shitty job.

Here’s my philosophy - you may fire me, but after a few months off, I’ll have another job. You’ll ALWAYS be the jerk I told to fuck off in front of his staff!

8

Not that I doubt you or anything, but there’s not a single author listed under the name “Mouse Maven” :dubious: :dubious: :dubious: :dubious:
:stuck_out_tongue:

9

:stuck_out_tongue: I’m on there, trust me. :wink:

10

Congrats for winning the good fight!

11

It was sneaky behavoir on my part. The pathology photos I took were an important part of the research. Since I used my personal camera, I told the PI that I would copy right the pics. (I was bluffing. I have no idea how copy right law works, but the PI believed me.)

12

One of the people I work with is a total asshole. Really. When you look up asshole in the dictionary, his picture should be there.

No matter what I am doing or how backlogged I am, if he wants something done I have to do it right now. He repeatedly makes me do things and then “can’t find them,” making me do the same things two or three times. He has NO computer skills. He often calls me on his cell phone to tell me to call other people to tell them to call him on his cell phone. He’ll call me five minutes before I’m suppose to leave with a half hour of work to do “right now” and I’ll find the work I did still sitting in his box the next afternoon. He has me work late and then refuses to give me a ride home. He’ll tell people he’ll leave stuff with me and then never does.

The guy is an idiot, but the overtime is good.

13

Back in the early 90s, I had a job where one of the duties was to copy about 20 floppies once a month or so. I had one computer with one floppy drive, so you basically had to do the thing where you traded floppies in and out for about 2 hours. It was stultifying dull. I’d asked previously if the company would purchase me work-related books or a subscription to a work-related magazine, and they refused. So I brought in reading material - books, magazines, newspapers - and read that while I was copying disks.

One of the owners didn’t like seeing me sitting at my desk reading a newspaper during working hours. My direct manager - who I hated - called me into her office one day and told me I wasn’t allowed to read the newspapers/books/magazines while I copied the disks.

“I’ve asked for work-related material, and was told no,” I said.

“It doesn’t look good to have you reading a newspaper during working hours,” idiot manager replied.

“So what am I supposed to do for 2 hours while I do this? I don’t have another computer that I can work on. Should I just stare at a wall for 2 hours?”

“Well, they are paying you. If they want you to stare at a wall for two hours, then that’s what you do.”

<stunned silence>

I was young enough then that I didn’t say anything, but I did quit within a couple months. Now, I would have run her around the table for saying such a thing to me. There’s not enough money in the world that’s enough to make me stare at a wall when there’s no need to. I’m so fookin’ sick of business owners and “managers” who are more interested in looks that actual work getting done. I don’t care if my co-workers come to work in clown outfits and spend the day juggling and balancing on their heads if the work gets done. Unfortunately the older I get, the more I realize that as long as you look like you’re working, that’s all that counts. At least in a lot of jobs.

14

About 4 years ago, I worked for a Tim Horton’s that was one of several franchised by the same guy (he had about 3 or 4 full size stores and about the same in outlets iirc).

Well I was a good worker there, and since I worked the night shift… well I must’ve looked like the next best thing since sliced bread as they had trouble keeping workers for that shift (they let the lady who trained me get away with stealing about $40 a night over about 5 years, because she was reliable. Everyone knew she was stealing, even his own kids told him that. She eventually quit after a month of my being there because she didn’t get a raise after her review… despite having been given it just before her review).

So, a couple months in I was basically the senior person on night shift for front counter/drive-through and then one of the night people for another store, just outside town, quit. I was asked if I would go out to that store (cab fare paid by the owner, as I don’t drive) and cover for a couple weeks until they hired some new people. Of course, I’m the only person out there except for the bakers and when the morning rush starts before the next shift starts to show up… oh, I hated it.

After almost a month, I finally catch the manager in his office (he was usually gone by the time I showed up to call my cab out to the other store, they only paid store to store not my door to the store) and I ask him when I’ll be coming back to this store, which was a very easy bike ride away from my apartment.

“Oh, you were transfered to the other store. You won’t be returning to this store.”

Did I mention that I also went to school? My shift was from 11-7 my class was from 8:30 to just before Noon. I was cutting it very fine just getting off shift, back home to change and get out to the train to get to school. I hated not having time for a shower and going to school smelling like coffee and glaze.

Oh, and unbeknownst to me at the time I was also pregnant, and I was fighting off a bad cold.

I went to work for the next week before I finally quit (I needed the money). Then it took me almost a year to get my ROE, I only finally got it when my step-mom, an auditor for the CRA, threatened them.

This is the same guy who hired his son as a manager, and his son set up cameras in the women’s washroom.

15

Good lord. I spent 17 years in IT. This is a field where people are promoted to management NOT for their people skills (they often don’t have any), but rather for their ability (usually) to organize things and do paperwork. Or because of who they know.

So the question would be: What job did I have where I wasn’t shat upon by my employers?

See the Quitting Fantasies thread in another forum for one job.

At another brief contract, where they hired people willy-nilly and didn’t know what to do with them, I had sat doing nothing for 2 month before complaining to my employer that I wasn’t happy doing nothing and that the position I’d been hired to fill had also been promised to five other people.

My employer’s response was to call me into the office, sit down at the far end of the same side of a long conference table, and tell me, without ever looking directly at me, how there must be something seriously wrong with me as a human being, based on some minor things that had recently happened to me (like a minor car accident). Because those things only happen to people who deserve it.

I went back to my office, where I’d been placed on supervised (um…word, word missing!) watch over my activities and proved that I was absolutely competent and worthy of everything they’d ever offered me - in the eyes of the clients, who were exceedingly happy with me and didn’t understand why my employer was acting the way he was. Then I got another job and quit via fax.

In the mean time, Mr. No Eye Contact tried several times to contact me and/or come out and visit me to tell me how great I was, but amazingly, I was always away from the phone or out of the office when he called or came by. No bullshit, it just always worked out that way with no games on my end.

Perhaps one of the only people I have ever truly wished Cancer upon without guilt. Because as you know, that sort of thing only happens to people who deserve it. (or so he said)
My last IT job, I got called into the Director’s office at 5pm on the day before the New Year’s Eve weekend. Heh, you can tell my work ethic by the fact that I was still there, working on the project. Shat upon my head because I was embarassing one of the people who worked on my project by trying to get her to stop fucking up the monthly production run like she’d done twice in a row.

Ah, but she was a family friend of his and had embarassed him by claiming, at the Christmas dinner table, that I was picking on her.

She proceeded to fuck up the production run three more times in a row, for a total of five months. But all I could do was take the heat (being Project Leader) and not say anything, because she was protected.

My manager on that job was a 26 year old punk with no people skills. Every Thursday, he’d come into our staff meeting and proclaim “Good news! We have computer time this weekend, so cancel your vacation and personal plans, because we’re all working!”.

As I said when I gave my notice; Just who the fuck thinks it’s “Good News” to be told to cancel vacation and family plans every weekend for months on end?

On my very last day, at the normal Thursday meeting, he pulled the same shit on my two remaining co-workers. They were extremely unhappy and refused. One because she was a consultant whose contract specifically stated that she did not work weekends. But she’d been forced to do so under threat of not renewing her contract, to the point where her fiance had given her an ultimatum. If she worked one more weekend, he was leaving her. The other person was supposed to be going back to her home town in another state to be a bride’s maid for her best friend’s wedding.

Without even looking up from his day planner, the manager just said “Well I’ll leave it up to you two to work it out, because we’re working this weekend.”

If I hadn’t been already leaving the company, he would have left the room in a bloody pile and I would have been escorted to jail.
My current boss is the “LaLaLa, I don’t want to hear anything bad!” type. This is cowardice and incompetence. It is an outright refusal to deal with the negative aspects of the job. I have no respect for her and I am in the process of finding another job.

16

I had to type up my own letter of termination.

I also had to type up my husbands letter of termination.
(The company was being bought, we were hired by the new company)

The new company end up selling us a couple years later. The New New Company chose not to hire me because they intended to dismantle the company, but they wanted me to contract for $8 hr to make them a web page (Which billed out at $125 hr) AND reassure all the customers that everything was going to be the same. Um, you are dismantling the company. Everything will not be the same.

17

tdn, THAT was an amazing story! It’s a wonder you didn’t just take a baseball bat to the guy!

18

I had too many awful experiences with crummy bosses, and it would make me ill to dredge any of it up here. But trust me, God knows there’s a lot of people that’ll get their due come Judgement Day on account of the knives they stuck in my back!

19

What’s the worst they could do if you refused? Would you still be there to this day?

20

I once went to work at a law firm where I was told that they didn’t pay overtime (and I was too young to realize this was totally illegal, of course), but they did pay hefty bonuses. They’d paid my predecessor a $2500 bonus, which she indeed confirmed. So silly me, I put in many, MANY extra hours of overtime, working on weekends, coming to work right after a car accident, etc. Come bonus time, after putting in all that extra time for a year, what did I get?

$250.

That was the only job I ever walked out of with no notice.