My company was discovered using monkeys for emissions tests. They were gassing monkeys, and legitimately used “everyone in the industry does it” as an internal defense to quell upset staff.
Fuck Volkswagen. Straight up. No fucks given, worst job I ever worked.
Wait, wtf… Volkswagen killed monkeys in emission tests?
Holy fuck you are right. Wtf is wrong with people…
The people’s car
Germans and gas chambers, name a more iconic duo.
Username checks out.
OH NO
Reminder that VW was established by Hitler.
What’s horrifying to me isn’t that VW used ‘everyone does it’ as a defense, it’s that multiple carmakers are apparently gassing monkeys for emission tests.
Jeez… did that story ever reach the press?!?
It seems to be public knowledge. I hadn’t heard of this either. Yet another in a long line of companies doing shitty things and I’m sure a lot of money spent to make sure this didn’t become household knowledge.
a lot of monkey spent
Huehuehehe…, its ok, I’ll show myself out…
I got a promotion. There was no raise in salary just expectations of more responsibilities. I got a $100 visa gift card. I saw that as a big fuck you. I was out as soon as I could manage.
My manager got a promotion with a hefty salary increase, then the company announced a hiring and salary freeze, then gave me a promotion with more responsibilities (some of my manager’s as well) but with the same salary.
I quited a few months later as soon as I could secure something else
I’m dealing with that right now with my current company. They’ve had me working in a role 4 positions above the one my title would indicate for the last year. Being healthcare, they blamed not being able to change my job title because they can’t afford increasing my pay during “these unprecedented times.” Now, a year later, they’re “working on updating my job title,” but it’s going to be a lateral title change with no change in payscale.
You bet I’m on my way outThat is also a giant red flag. Normally, when you are paid via some non-taxable reward, it means your “promotion” isn’t ever going to come with benefits that allow you to go climbing up the ladder. You made a good decision there.
Worked at a day center that cared for adults with developmental disabilities. Part of my job was picking up, dropping off clients, event trips, activities. In my 1st 3 months there, I saw:
Coworker parked bus, pushed wheelchair client onto lift, walked away to smoke a cig. Client and wheelchair 10 feet off pavement, not tied down.
Some staff had to clean, change diapers. They would grab clients, throw them down, rip diapers off, spray lysol on their genitals.
In parking lot, coming back from trip, coworker shoved client so hard he fell face first into asphalt, bleeding, tooth chipped.
I could go on.
I tried talking with manager several times. She didn’t care. I really needed the money, but couldn’t stomach it, called adult protective services, who came out, and they got in serious trouble, shut down temporarily, manager fired, fines, etc. Lost the job, but don’t regret it.
Sounds similar to a job I had at an old folks home.
Throw wage theft and other DoL labor violations in.
I was happy to hear to hear when the state shut them down.
Just wish I had been older and less naive, I should have documented and reported myself, but I was a dumb kid.
This kind of nonsense is why my mom moved in with us. There are so many horror stories about elderly abuse, and those homes are freaking expensive!
Good on you. Years ago I delivered pizza when I was like 17. A couple times I had to go to a facility like this and it was the most appalling thing. I couldn’t believe how callus the staff were and I left after dropping off the pizza wanting to cry. If I had a bit more life experience I would have called APS. I still wish I had but I was a dumb 17 year old at the time that felt completely powerless
Holy fucking shit, those people sound like the scum of the Earth. How the fuck do they live with themselves?
I spent one night cleaning commercial airliner cabins at a regional airport.
Since I was would have basically unrestricted access to commercial airliners post 9/11, I had to go through serious screening to get this job. Fingerprinting, MASSIVELY invasive federal background checks, the whole 9 yards. You’d think I was going to work at the Pentagon. But that’s a good thing. If someone has momentarily unfettered access to an entire jet that will be carrying a ton of jet fuel and hundreds of passengers, I absolutely want to make sure people are thoroughly vetted. It was made ABUNDANTLY clear to me, the potential consequences of fucking up this job. If I were liable for a fuck up I would be at the very least fined thousands of dollars, at worst I’d be thrown into federal prison.
So my first day passes and I get called into my supervisors office. Apparently I missed a non-sanctioned magazine a previous passenger had left in a seat back of a flight. I wasn’t being fired or fined, but I was on final warning. Over a magazine. I quit on the spot.
I also forgot to mention that this job payed barely above minimum wage…
I wasn’t going to bust my ass cleaning airplane cabins, risking my livelihood and freedom for a fucking pittance.
When the CEO let everybody work from home except for a female junior dev on my team. Not sure whether it was because she’s female or an immigrant, but the two of us had other jobs within a month. Fuck these powertripping CEOs.
The entire pandemic, our security operations team got constant commendations for how rapidly we scaled up, and they touted the increased productivity we had WFH. I was officially reclassified as a remote worker at the start of Covid.
Then we got a new manager after 2 years who decided everyone needed to RTO “as needed”, then monthly, then weekly.
My disabilities and medication prevents me from safely operating a vehicle to commute and my respiratory disability puts me at an extremely high risk of complications from Covid (was bedrested for 3 days from Covid, took almost a month to mostly recover, after multiple booster shots).
Tried to get accommodation, which I had never had to formally get before. Was surprisingly easy to get from HR, but my manager on the other hand made my life hell.
My manager, though, pulled out all the stops.
- He submitted a “request for family leave” for every workday that I was working from home instead of the office while I was working through HR accommodation request process. which I only found out about after HR mailed me a letter formally denying the requests.
- Then my manager straight up told me, “I think the only reason you put in a request for accommodation is to avoid coming into the office”
- Manager would “Forget” to invite only me to meetings, when others that were WFH due to illnesses like Covid would get an invite.
Jokes on them, though, I left with a very short notice, little to no documentation on key projects that I was the sole driver and maintainer on. Literally left 2-year project with 2 pages of documentation that weren’t even up to date.
- Went from making $100K total comp to over $150K total comp.
- Insurance is kickass, talking like $400/m medication only costing $15/m with no deductible.
- Nice RSU package, 60k over 4 years
- No after-hours or on-call, no SLAs
Early job delivering flowers in a work provided van. Late 90s.
Company is a one-man-band with me as second employee/driver. Vans ‘maintained’ by the owners wishy washy mate.
On a delivery run, driving down a hill toward a stop sign to cross a dual carriageway.
Brakes fail.
Quick engine braking down through the gears(column mounted) to first, and then pull the t-bar park brake to just pull up at the stop sign as two cars go past at 70kmh.
Call the owner, tell him brakes have failed, he says “no they didn’t”, I see red and say “yes they fucking did, I quit”. I was seething.
A corner cutting brake bleed, leaving air in the lines almost had me in a car accident. Yeah, fuck those clowns.
CEO scolded me in front of my team for joining a meeting virtually and told me to come into the office more frequently. The underlying assumption that my work is not good unless I come in is what drove me away. Especially because it’s a hybrid position and my commute sucks. 1 day remote is not hybrid. The interview process led me to believe they were far more flexible than they actually are.
A similar thing just happened at my current hybrid job. My company is owned by a much larger corporation and the only reason it hasn’t been fully absorbed is because we’re making a lot of money for them. An email was sent out from corporate with the usual RTO talking points (COVID is over, we did great working apart but now we need to all come in to work together because we’re better this way) with the due date being early September. Less than an hour went by when a rep from my company sent out a follow up email asking us to ignore the first message because it’s only for the parent company. I was halfway done updating my resume when I saw it. I’m guessing there where more than just a few people who sent out some very angry emails to upper management.
My boss gave me stupid directions - stuff I knew was wrong or inefficient. I tried to convince her otherwise, she wasn’t having it, and I’m in trouble if I don’t do what she says. Fine, I’ll follow your stupid orders, no problem. My dad taught me, “If they want a little bullshit, give 'em a little bullshit.”
Then in a meeting with her and her boss, I get asked why I did the stupid thing. “Well, I was directed specifically do to that very thing.”
He says to me, with her right there, “Well, you need to take responsibility for your actions.”
Started applying the next day, now have a team working for me who are great, and my greatest fear is giving them stupid directions.
Don’t give directions. Offer support. Unblock them. Teach them to be autonomous experts. Good managers help their teams do their work by making sure they don’t have to do anything but their work.
You probably already know this, but I’m saying it for the group. Good managers exist, and their role is to help actual workers work more effectively and remove obstacles to good work. Not to tell people how to work.
I’ve known several people that were good leaders until they became management, then it just became like Danno’s experience. “Fuck you, I got mine” was all too common of a way of thinking at my former place of employment.
Grew up with 2 passions- cars and computers. Wound up working at dealerships for 12 or so years.
One day I’d been with this dealer for about 4 years, I got passed over for a better position because “You’re too good at what you do to move you out of it.”
I’d been looking for an excuse to go back to computers, and that was it. Quit on the spot, took my tools home and started tech school.
I worked in Customer Support as one of the most senior people in the department. I wanted to be a programmer for the same company. They had many openings. They passed me up countless times saying you’re for sure going to get it next time. Finally a supervisor was honest with me. They never intended to let me leave support as they knew it’d be a major loss for the Support Department if I left.
Naturally that killed my motivation and so I started not caring about the work and turned down my energy and output. Started telling the mgmt no I wont work on Support tools code anymore. I made a bunch of tools used by the support team, Dashboards, zendesk apps, lots of browser scripts to fix common problems instantly. I just would reply It’s not in my job Description. Make a role for me in Support or give me one of the many programming jobs and I’ll do it.
So they started writing me up for insubordination.
After the second write up I told them they were only guaranteeing that I would leave the company. I wouldn’t wait for the 3rd strike and I’m out. I told them they have turned support into a Dead Sea. They would make it impossible for their best employees to stay and they would all leave, Like the water in the dead Sea, leaving only the salt, the people who don’t perform / care.
Took me all of 30 days to find a programmer gig with twice the pay. I should have left them years ago. Moral of the story is this, The business doesn’t give a shit about you, Don’t misplace your loyalty. There is no honor in staying at workplace that doesn’t work with you.
And my prediction of the Dead Sea effect taking hold after I left has shone to be quite true. When I was there, they would end the week every week with an empty bucket. Avg ticket closes per rep were 100+ (fantastic for us). After I left they haven’t seen the bottom of the bucket once. It’s thousands deep and avg rep is closing only half what they used to. The friends I have still there (not in support but can see tickets) say that everyone left is clueless. [
assholes. what morons.
From the CEO: “Our competitors won’t accept these jobs. They result in too many workman’s comp claims. We’ll take them.”
It’s a gig economy company… They are willing to take them because the workers are considered independent contractors and not employees. They offload liability onto the workers themselves.
Good lord do I wish I was recording that when it happened…
My original contract was anytime before 9 to whatever 9 hours after star was. So, if I decided to get to work at 9, my shift would end at 6. If I didn’t take a lunch, it would 5. Now, I usually left anywhere between 7p and 9p (averaging on 7p), with some days at 11p. So, given the extra hours, I allowed myself to get it as close to 9 as possible, considering I’d likely stay 10+ hours anyway. Turds tended to hit the fans around 4p/5p, extending my hours. It was the nature of the job.
New manager comes. He doesn’t like that his employees don’t get there at 8, but doesn’t bother to tell me. He just tries to writes me up. We have policies, where I have to be told and given an opportunity to improve before a write up, so he and HR do that. But what they say is, “if you don’t think you’ll get to work by 815am, call Mr. Manager”. Ok, cool. So, I call him every morning. Then the write up. I ask why, and they said that I’m not at work by 815. I explain that I’m adhering to my contract AND I work WAY longer than anyone else, including Mr. Manager. “That contract was with the previous manager” they said. “With all due respect, it wasn’t. It was with the Company. And Mr. Manager never attempted to renegotiate a new contract, nor would I have agreed to it anyway. So, let me get this straight… You care more about arrival time, than the hours I put in ensuring the lines never go down?”. “Yes” they respond, “but you still have to make sure the lines don’t go down”. “Ok, so the extra hours and effort I put in, every single day, mean nothing and I’m still getting written up?” “Correct”. “Ok. The consider this my two-week’s notice”
Whoo. I thought I was over this, but reliving it just now pissed me off something fierce, I’ll tell you that for free!
i would have told them that since, according to them, the contract was with the manager not the company, then it was void the moment he was replaced, and therefore I have long since already worked my notice period. And leave there and then
I didn’t want to burn bridges, but I did think something to that effect haha
It was an internship and I didn’t plan on staying but once I got called in the manager’s office. He asked me if I were doing some industrial spying . At that point in life all I wanted was to go home and play some games for the rest of summer until university starts over.
He threatened me he could see everything I did on my computer and asked me if he should look it up. To which I said go ahead you’ll find my job.
Couple days later I arriver exactly 3 minutes lates because of public transportation issue. I used to arrive 15 minutes early everyday because my transport schedule was that way. I got summoned again to tell me to leave earlier.
I told all that to my university and they decided to blacklist the company. Being that my university was part of a .bigger network, their behaviour led them to be cut off from the biggest local intern pool.
No idea why they were so annoying, I wasn’t even browsing Reddit on their computer back then and used my phone for that kind of stuff. No idea what lead them to think I’d steal data. I don’t even know if they have competitors haha
My first job out of the military, I was hired as a project manager and was largely brought on to improve their processes. After speaking when almost every person in this company (200 or so), documenting the current business processes, and pulling together feedback for areas of improvement, I put together a plan to present to the president of the company (my boss). He said all the right things, but took absolutely no action. A few months and a few repetitions of this, and my boss asked me how I was doing the Wednesday before Christmas. I told him I was frustrated due to the lack of process improvement. He told me “if you can’t find a way to be happy with how things are, maybe it’s time to look elsewhere”
Noted. I had a recruiter call me the next day, and that turned into an offer making another 30%, remote two days a week, shorter hours, and a better work climate. My boss had the audacity to tell me I should’ve talked to him about it
I won the major ideation jam at a tech telecom company every year I worked there, making them millions…
Meanwhile I was having my desk destroyed and harassed due to my disability by lower management
I sued them for discrimination not but two weeks after I came back from the vacation I win because I got the desk trashing on camera.
Damn that feels good
