Some people suck, plain and simple...

I work at a "small" steel factory (about the size of a Wal-Mart) that's non-union and usually only has about four people on the floor and an office staff of six. Though a couple of my co-workers can be trying at times, our plant manager and the owner are very good, fair people. They always come out to see how I'm doing, ask how my daughter is (they know she has health problems), what work issues need to be addressed not "general small talk" but actual concern, and they take everything you say into note. They spend extra money on employees for things like barbecue lunches, better and more convenient tools and equipments, better health benefit packages, and free college education (provided your grades are decent and the courses merge with the job). Even though it's sweaty, blue collar work I enjoy this place because I work under great people.

Nett, I serisouly hope those guys that ripped you off get sucked into a vortex. That's just theft, and that's all it is.

 

When I moved to Toronto in 2004, I starting working for a data entry company in Etobicoke and I stayed there for 3 and a half years. I quit when I found a job with a financial company downtown. It was only a contract position through a placement agency, but things went very well. Within 6 months, my contract had been extended and my manager was training me to replace her because she was set to move into another position. 5 months after that, I was unemployed.

I received a call from the placement agency on a Friday evening and they simply said that my assignment with the company was over and that I didn't go back on Monday morning. I didn't know what to say. How did I go from being groomed for a low-level management position to shit-canned in such a short period of time? When I asked for a reason, the woman I was talking to mumbled something about performance issues and said that my contract had been terminated. I sat on that for the weekend and tried to get in touch with my now former manager on Monday, but she refused to take a call from me and wouldn't reply to an e-mail. I was never given an official reason for my dismissal, but my Record of Employment states that my contract ended and that I'd been laid off. It doesn't say that I was fired.

I'd made several friends within the company, so I asked around. While no one knew the exact reason I was let go, the most popular theory was that the people above my manager were starting to question why a lowly contract employee was starting to run the department better than she was, so she had my position axed in an attempt to cover her own ass.

 

From September last year to February this year, I was working for a big company. In Mining or Enterprise resourcing - you'd have heard of them. Their customer list includes a fair section of the 50 biggest businesses in the world. The closest I've been to an alcoholic was the 6 months I worked for them - the most stressful and unpleasant job I've ever had. Among other issues - they told me the pittance I was on (agreed to under the misrepresentation that it would be a super cruisy low stress job where I could show up and do a very narrowly defined job and then go home with nothing to think about) was actually over paying for my skills.

I left I picked up 50% pay bump at my next job. The bump for my current role means a 100% pay bump from what they told me was over paying for my skills. And honestly, I'm being conservative in calculating my income at the current role because of the way the contract is structured. Per hour worked, it's more like 130% more than what I was on with those goat fuckers. I hope every single member of their management team gets crabs.

 

I was hired as a fresh-out-of college grad into one of Canada's largest grocery chains - I was hired to be an IT worker, and the official plan was I'd work six months in stores as a grocery hack (still making my IT salary however), 3 months in an IT department that I never planned to work in, three months in Central Merchandising Operations, and then get dropped in my 'final role' with the company where I was guaranteed to stay after everything was over.

The first hitch was my 'final role' was with people with 20+ years experience in the industry. My days were basically "read the manual" so I asked for a transfer to a team where I did actual work. HR was not pleased going off saying "we invested all this money in to you why would you want to change teams?" - my manager pointed out I didn't do fuck all because there was no work for me (nor was any of the money the company invested in me applicable to that role), and HR buckled, however my new team's manager has been the most passive-aggressive bitch ever. Very polite and up front face to face, but in emails turns into an aggressive tool. It doesn't help that I'm fairly sure I've been set up to fail in a few scenarios (like configuring an intentionally broken server I had no privileges to fix, and chastising me for asking for assistance after previously establishing that if I have any issue to... ask for assistance). She took the performance issues she custom-engineered to HR, and got me put on a probationary period (ends Oct 14) which among other things, robbed me of my 18-month raise (apparently every other performance review I aced is irrelevant). So now I'm documenting everything I do and every email sent to me for HR in case I get another 'engineered to fail' scenario, while polishing off my resume just in case.

 

The first law firm I worked for were a pack of bastards. They generally failed to live up to their end of the traineeship agreement when I was an articled law clerk by just shoving me into whatever menial role they needed and neglecting to allow me experience in various departments. Their true colours came out, however, when I quit.

After I got my degree and became admitted (as a lawyer), they put me on the "standard" two year contract. The remuneration for the first year were relatively low, but I accepted them given that I felt I needed more experience before I could be useful somewhere else. In the contract was a provision that a review would be done at the end of the first year and a new salary set. So, I worked my butt off for that year. I was basically running the section I was in because the partner I was working under was on medical leave for about 6 months with some funky stress related skin disorder.

Around the end of the 12 months I was getting myself sorted for what I was going to ask for in the review. One week I got my pay slip and noticed that my hourly rate had increased by 50c (even though I was on salary, all employees got an attributed hourly wage rate). I asked the office manager what the increase was for. His reply was that that was the outcome of my review, and that the partner had discussed this with me when I met with him. Apparently I must have slept through that one. He didn't seem concerned about the fact that the meeting hadn't occurred and simply left it at "well, that's your new pay". The guy was a toady ex bank manager, well known for being little more than a spy anyway.

Within about three days I'd secured a new position at a top tier firm. My brother knew a partner at the firm who needed an employee lawyer in property and securities, which most of my experience was in. I met him after work, and he offered me the job the next day; at double the salary I was currently on. Needless to say I took it.

I approached the partner I thought I had the best relationship with and tendered my resignation. I even gave two months notice as I was starting at the new firm after Christmas. That's when the shit hit the fan.

I arrived at work the next day to find a typed letter on my desk informing me that I couldn't quit and that if I persisted I would be sued for breach of my contract. None of the partners would speak to me about it and I had to correspond in writing through the office manager. I told them to shove it up their ass since contracts for personal services are generally unenforceable, and they had breached a material term of the contract by failing to have a consultative salary review. This started a cold war. I was variously told that I couldn't leave until a replacement had been found (I ended up finding my replacement for them anyway), that I couldn't leave until certain files had been completed, that I would be required to return and work on any file they deemed necessary and that I would lose all of my accrued entitlements. None of those are legal.

Finally, when I threatened to report them to the Law Society for general douchebaggery, they said that I could leave but that they would hold my entitlements for 30 days and would only release them if no problems emerged on any of my files. This was still illegal, but I didn't give a shit by that stage. On the 30th day, I phoned the office manager and asked if my cheque was going to be released. He said it was and that he would post it to me.

"Screw that", I said, "I'm on my way over."

The new firm, who were up to speed on what had happened, had no problem with me driving straight over there and collecting my money.

 

How fitting that this thread would appear this morning, after last night my husband finally admitted that the company he is currently working for is a sinking ship. He's three weeks back on his paycheques, and this week will certainly bring him to four - because I'm positive that they don't have a lick of cash to pay him.

The problem with my husband is that he's so trusting and naive in business relationships. He grows to like people, on a personal level, and it clouds his judgement about the stability and security of the company. This happened a few years back, and it was exactly the same situation. "Are you sure the company is safe? Are you sure there is enough work coming in? Are you sure they don't owe money to suppliers?" His answer was always yes, yes, yes - even as the company is about to crash and burn.

I'm pretty sure he's going to end up having to ask them to lay him off so that he can collect Employment Insurance. We can't be four weeks back on paycheques. We have bills that need to be paid. It sounds like everyone is in denial about this being the end for them.

So... yeah. My life totally blows dogs for quarters at the moment.

 

The guy I work for right now took me on as sous-chef of his new place based solely on the strength of my reputation with the head chef of his other joint, a man I barely know. No interview, no phone calls, no resume, nothing. I showed up 13 days ago, shook his hand, briefly discussed salary, and got down to business.

I've put in an appalling number of hours since I began, and I'm starting to get tired. No sweat. As a thank you, the new boss, being a former chef, took my shift today and told me to go home and fuck the wife a couple times. And he cleared my tab. I mean, fuck, he's worked more hours than me in the last two weeks!

Now, make no bones about it, this dude is a dyed-in-the-wool, hard-charging fellow. He's also one of the most stand up guys I've ever met. He's deadly honest and calls you on your shit the minute he finds out about it. It's refreshing to get that kind of thing because I learn from my mistakes, quickly and effectively, and I don't feel that fear I used to get when I didn't think I was up to par in my performance.

You know, for all the shit I hate about the restaurant industry in terms of sheer workload, stress, money, and physical trauma, I must say I'm certainly blessed in being able to find jobs in my line of work in minutes flat. I don't have to deal with all the piddle and crap most "professionals" do.

 

I've actually never once been screwed by an employer, I've been (in my opinion) mistreated, and have done work I find shitty in a ridiculously (and needlessly) high stress environment, but I've never been outright lied to or not paid for my work.

My first job out of school was definitely a 'just a number' job. HUGE international firm and I was at the very bottom. I remember spending a lot of time coming up with a more efficient process for doing a project and being told by a manager in another department "we don't pay you to think". Now, everyone I worked for and with were cool people, but dealing with other departments was a nightmare, and they probably weren't even bad people, the environment of a large company just makes good people do bad things.

I work for a smaller company now and it's great. Flexible schedule, I wear tshirt, shorts and flip flops to the office, work from home when I need to, low stress etc... But that stuff is just ancillary to the one big thing: I actually get paid to think. An idea or decision I make can greatly change how the entire company operates, and because we don't have 500 layers of approval to do anything it happens quick while it still matters and I get to see the end result. This has been such a big improvement over my last job. I don't get angry when thoughts of work pop into my head when I'm not working now, I use to fight it out of my head.

That said I'll probably end up at a big company again because they pay more and I'm a greedy pig.

 

The company I work for is notorious for being difficult to get money from. Be it a vendor, a rep agency, or even employees you have to put in work to get paid anything besides your salary.

I'm paid commission and there have been points in time where they've owed me more than my yearly salary which is disgusting. I used to get pissed and camp out in accounting until they cut me a check. I've paid reps out of my own pocket because they were owed commission from a project that wrapped up 6 months previous.

I'm lucky though because 99% of my sales have purchase orders that come directly through my email. I'm then responsible for writing up a build/spec sheet for both production & invoicing. When the balance of what they owe me in both commission & expenses gets ugly I just hold out these documents. This means no money coming in which amazingly causes the company checkbook to open and a healthy check to be written.

Its still fucked up, especially when coworkers that NEED these funds are fobbed off and have to grovel for what they're owed.

 

Oh do I have things to contribute to this thread:

Right before I graduated last year, I got a full-time work from home job with an iPhone app that wasn't exactly what I wanted to be doing, but was on the fringe of two industries I wanted to get into and paid me enough to move to New York. It was great for the first month or so. Even though they were a startup, they were getting tons of press and being wildly successful. Our bosses were based in L.A, and the 25 or so of us were spread around California and New York, but the communication between everyone was really good and the working "environment" (as much as you can have one when no one has met each other) was nice.

Then, about a month into it, they told us we basically had to be rehired because the magazine that was sponsoring the app wanted to give their approval for everyone working on it. (I have no idea why this wasn't an initial part of the hiring process.) I was on a trip at the time, so when I came back I was greeted with the news that I couldn't work again until I got "recertified" by the magazine. The people at the magazine kept forgetting, and my bosses weren't pushing too hard to remind them since it meant one less person to pay, so I went two months without a single shift right as I was moving to one of the most expensive places in the world to live.

I eventually was blessed by the magazine to get back to work, but the initial rush of success had dwindled, and they were realizing they had overhired and overpromised hours. I was given one shift (6 hours) a week for MONTHS while others continued to have 3 or even 4 a week, and the logic behind who got decent numbers of shifts was nonexistent and totally unfair. Meanwhile, communication completely ended between the bosses and us - any emails to them would go completely ignored. Not to mention that they were gradually dropping about half of the original staff by no longer giving them any hours, and then not answering their emails. They weren't even told they were being let go, just bit by bit it had to dawn on them that they didn't have a job anymore.

In the past year, I've finally managed to get a steady three shifts a week and since there are so few of us left we all more or less have equal schedules. (There are still some things about it that are unfair, but oh well.) However, I still go months without hearing a word from my bosses, and we pretty much run the app ourselves, including scheduling which is basically the one, single duty our bosses have to do. We had this huge scare a few days ago where we were all freaking out that they were discontinuing the app and not telling any of us, because we found out it was no longer in the app store but, long story short, after ignoring emails of such a high level of importance (Hey, do we still have jobs?) for a few days, they finally got back to us and told us what happened and that we had nothing to worry about. Oh, and one of us left and we were all excited for her shifts to get redistributed, but she hooked her sister up with a job instead.

I try to focus on the perks but, damn, sometimes it is difficult.

 

I have had two different job situations and I am not sure which one is worse. About 10 years ago I went to work for an independent adjustment and appraisal firm as the receptionist. The office manager was an older gentleman. After I had been there a year or two the office manager tells me that he will be retiring in a year. He also begins taking off multiple days a week to play golf and take trips. He grooms me to run the office while he is away and I have to fight tooth and nail to get the guys in the office to respect me. Finally the guys come around and as the year ends embrace the fact that I could be the new office manager. Keep in mind the current office manager made over 200k a year and I had effectively been doing his job plus mine for at least 6 months for 30k a year. I approach the president and vice president of the company and discuss a contract where I start with a small raise and move up to 200k by the time I would retire. This would lock their expenses down regardless of inflation and secure myself a pretty nice future. Next thing I know management decides to hire another guy who had just graduated college and only had about 6 months experience in the field and wanted ME to train him! It was an unspoken rule in this company that they did not hire women or people without a college degree for management. Most everyone in the company assumed they would make an exception this time due to the fact that the office manager had spent a year training me. I gave my two weeks notice at that point and both myself and the previous office manager refused to train the new guy. I think the vice president of the company had to train him in the end.

Second scenario happened just about 2 years ago. I was out of work (outside sales) due to the declining economy when a friend of mine was able to get me an interview with an attorney who needed a secretary. The attorney was a sweet likeable guy who seemed very shy and kind of Opie Cunningham-like. I was offered the job after two interviews with the attorney and one with the other 2 partners in the firm. I noticed after a few weeks that the attorney seemed to be hiding medical bills and appointments from the other partners and his wife. I really became concerned that he had some sort of serious illness due to some of the medical procedures that were being discussed. Imagine my surprise a few months later when he ends up in rehab and I find out all of his illnesses are due to his alcohol addiction. It gets better. His wife drops by the office to collect a few of his things and casually mentions that he had an affair with his last secretary and she was glad I was a newlywed. Awkward. So now I am working in a brand new office with people who are irritated that my boss is in rehab, trying to conduct business by the few phone calls and emails he was able to send a day, and working with another firm who was handling his cases who knew he had an affair with his last secretary.

I now work in retail for a company that pays salary plus commission after a certain dollar amount in sales. I have never made commission in the year I have been here. In fact I have had no customers at all today but a quiet job beats some of the alternatives in my opinion.

 

I worked in a place that was staffed mainly by pill/weed users. And by users, I mean that their drug cocktails of choice were what most of these people's lives revolved around. They came in fucked up, dealt to each other on the clock, got high right after work, got high at work....you know you need a change of scenery when you see someone snorting crushed Xanax pills off the top of a dish machine.* Or when a staff vacancy opens up, and the new hire is a referral from a drug addict. Employment prerequisites were basically US citizenship and a referral from a currently employed drug addict. The problem with this is that not only do groups of drug addict friends in the same workplace tend to do more working than talking, they also get into arguments about who screwed who over on their last drug deal, uniting just long enough to back each other up against anyone they don't like.**

The solution my exec came up with? Select me and one other person, and told us almost flat-out that if anyone was slacking and not working, we were responsible for picking up the slack. I was told bluntly that two of the reasons I lost points on my yearly review were for "not being a team player" (not doing the work of my teammate while he sat on his ass and talked to his buddy), and "unprofessional behavior" (bothering management about this behavior/ reaming idiot druggies for being lazy / standing up for myself when they tried to talk shit). This was three months after I was given a raise for a month before being told they couldn't afford to let me keep it, so they were dropping me back to my previous rate.

Not at all surprising that a personal vendetta and a convenient screwup on someone else's part cost me that job. The only good thing that happened to me there was being fired.

Now, I'm lucky to have found a place where my coworkers are sober, friendly, and intelligent (although they all love country music, which is a bit of a con). When I told my boss I was diagnosed with depression/bipolar tendencies, he was supportive and empathetic, even complimenting me on the quality of my performance despite that issue. Do I want to work there the rest of my life? Fuck no, but I can walk in knowing that the only expectation is a have a reasonable attitude and do my job to the best of my ability. Even after I finish college and move on, that's an environment I'll have a hard time finding again.

*Everyone know the Bill Hicks rant wherein he states that Hitler was doing a great job, he was just an underachiever? I thought that was a horrible thing to say, and completely baseless....until that job.

** "Why don't you kill yourself so your mother can supplement her welfare income with the life insurance payout?" and "You'll get a better high if you spray oven cleaner on your weed/pills" are NOT the best ways to make friends with drug addicts. Who knew?

 

One summer for work, I was pulled off to a different city, more or less alone, for several months, and put up in a cheap motel without Internet access. My boss (who was a level or two higher than my actual supervisor) frequently had me over for dinner and to use the Internet. It was ridiculous, and the organization actually teaches people at that level to maintain much more of a disconnect from people in my position. She could make my life pretty shit by sending me out to the middle of nowhere, and because of the contract, there's not much recourse for me. In retrospect, they treated me stupidly well.

 

I smell bullshit. What was the job you were doing? I only ask because if this place was really employing so many drug abusers/fuck ups, I'm assuming it's service industry/shitty minimum wage work. You seem like you're a reasonably intelligent guy, probably not as smart as you think you are, but smart enough to feel like you're superior to other people. Maybe you had a chip on your shoulder and acted like an asshole to people because you thought the job/coworkers were beneath you? Pretty good way to alienate yourself and look like a dickhead.

I just find it really hard to believe that a business stays operable employing nothing but current drug addicts while punishing people who are good workers. So you're either embellishing/lying about it all to rationalize the fact that you got shitcanned from a job you didn't even like by people you thought you were better than, or....nah, that's pretty much the only option here.

You'll probably post some specifics about why I'm wrong, I don't know anything, etc, but c'mon dude...read what you wrote. There are tons of fucked up workplaces and tons of shitty people out there, but your post is basically nothing but excuses as to why something happened, with none of them coming back to you. Yeah fuckin' right.

*drops mic*

 

...

 

I thought he sounded similar to Poo on previous posts, but not this one. And I agree with him here, no matter how you slice it 18-21 year old college kids make REALLY shitty employees with their lack of experience, general naivete and superiority complex. He probably thought he was more valuable than he was, just like a normal person his age does.

 

Nah, it's me. Where's that ban hammer?