At the tail end of a massive maintenance shutdown (16 hr days for everyone, for 2 weeks) the mill leadership started a site-wide meeting with pictures and stories of their recent trip to Japan. How they went golfing, the great meals they had, their trip to the mountain, etc. They finally wrapped that up and proceeded to tell us that cost of living raises were going to be small that year due to them being “unsure about next year’s profit margins”.
There was a pretty steady wave of resignation letters for the 6 months following that meeting.
Jesus, some people just have no awareness whatsoever.
It’s almost always better for a company to have resignations than layoffs.
So it’s kind of always been a thing for them to “encourage” resignations with shit like this, then hire back new people later for drastically lower salaries.
It’s what a lot of places are doing now mandating return to the office.
That sounds good in theory but with layoffs you tend to at least aim to let the worst employees go. With resignations you have literally the opposite. The best people are the ones that will go and the best ones will go first as they can and will find a new job more easily.
Not saying that they don’t do it for that reason but sometimes (and I’d say most times) people are just incompetent and do stupid shit like this.
The added olive on the shit pizza here is that skilled maintenance personnel, at least where I am, are a fairly small trade, and word gets around. I’ve never heard of “official” blackballing, but we ticketed folks gossip pretty readily about industry employers, and are in high demand.
Moves like that will guarantee that they can’t get experienced tradies, and even if they do, the ones that are willing to go to their next shutdown will be keeping an eye out for trouble, and at the slightest sign of bullshit and will probably cackle with glee while screwing with this employer.
Beware the phrase “I can retire anytime.”
Quiet firings.
Quiet hirings are a thing now too…
Companies are putting up postings for positions they don’t have any intention of filling any time soon.
This way when they are ready to hire, they finally look at resumes and can start scheduling interviews ASAP. It’s shifting all the wait time of the process to applicants.
Combine the two, and you end up with companies being able to maintain bare minimum staffing regardless of workload without having to ever pay severance packages.
It’s actually really smart, as long as you don’t have the tiniest shred of empathy and think of workers as machines and not people.
That’s messed up.
Really explaibs how I got an answer to my application 14 month later. But they were consulting work companies. So you were hired when they needed a consultant with your profile.
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That’s utterly diabolical if that was the intention
Not to mention that the company doesn’t have to pay unemployment for those that resign but do for those that are laid off.
Or they don’t care because they feel they deserve it and we peons don’t.
Similar thing happened at my first job out of college. It was a year into COVID and we’d been WFH since the spring before this annual June meeting. They had just gotten done announcing that our productivity had exceeded targets, when they added two more announcements:
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WFH was ending, and we’d all have to go back to an office that didn’t have enough desks for everyone to be there all at once but that was okay because we could all just coordinate amongst ourselves as to who gets to sit where and when and when we had in person all-hands meetings some people could just sit on the floor and work.
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Due to a lawsuit filed against an entirely different OU we shouldn’t expect much in the way of bonuses this year.
We saw the stress the company was under between the lawsuit and the move, so over the next couple months we helped by cutting about a million dollars a year from their annual salary budget.
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I thought I made people mad by ordering a curry chicken sandwich in a student-ran shop in college, but I hadn’t paid attention to an announcement that was made at the end of the class and I accidentally interrupted the minute of silence for a terrorist attack that had happened a few days before
Good lord 😂
They called me chicken curry til I finished college
I remember a pause for a minute’s silence announced in the upper concourse of a train station (UK) last year. It was disconcertingly comedic as the people walking in either on the phone or with a friend were very confused at why everyone inside was standing motionless and glaring at them.
I think I was working in that station on that day, because I have a very similar anecdote. Actually someone came to buy a ticket, and was annoyed because they thought they might miss their train having to wait for the minute’s silence to end. Not even the most callous passenger I’ve come across either.
Ooooof. This sounds like something I would do. Ugh. I want to hide right now just thinking about it. Glad you made it through to the other side. :)
Went to a cousin’s wedding, her parents split when she was little so I’d not seen my Uncle Mal for decades. Tbh everyone was expecting him not to show because he’s a selfish twat and knows nobody likes him.
Surprise, Mal is here. He had an inexplicably-attractive, younger date (Mal was a disgusting, horrid-breathed, lumpy old man and his date was a pretty, well-spoken woman in her 30s so we all assumed she was an escort, as Mal has no redeeming qualities).
The whole time everyone is desperately avoiding being stuck alone with him, and everyone is talking about having the same conversation… Mal has written a book, he’s a writer now, and he’s written a poem he wants to read.
He was given many hints, subtle and not-so-subtle that his poem wasn’t wanted and he agreed not to read it. Unfortunately whether due to ego or wine, he loudly interrupted someone elses toast to announce he had a poem to read. Our collective hearts sank.
It was worse than we expected, at one point including cringe-inducing references to his daughter having large breasts. It went on and on for at least 5 minutes of everyone silently looking at the floor, sneaking the occasional “No way he just said that?!” glances at each other. He eventually finished, and just stood there awkwardly for about 10 secs, I assume waiting for applause, which obviously was not forthcoming.
Read the fucking room Mal, no-one wants to hear your shitty poem and no-one cares that you’re (allegedly) a published writer now. And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
That sounds horrible but in good news this was probably the funniest story I’ve heard on Lemmy so far
The last sentence I will admit is a shameless ripoff of a line from It’s Always Sunny, rest is my writing so I’m glad you enjoyed it. At least some good came from suffering his presence!
It reminds me of Malcom in the Middle where Hal thinks he’s supposed to speak at every funeral. No one wants him to speak so they all look over at him to see if he’s going to anyway. He always takes it as a sign they they want him to speak. 😂
“Read the fucking room Mal” deserves to become a thing.
If I ever see an unkind comment and someone replies with “Read the fucking room Mal” I think I’d lose my shit with delight
And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
My sides
Honesty compels me to inform you that this ending sentence was shamelessly stolen from It’s Always Sunny. Highly recommend it, first season is a bit ropey as they are literally filming, writing, scripting themselves with no experience and at the start of their acting careers. An incredible show though imo!
I swear this feels like a plot point from a Righteous Gemstones episode. Sounds like you have a real life Uncle Baby Billy
I’ve been meaning to watch this show but I was put off by the evangelical-ness of it… worth watching then? This happened in the UK about 8 yrs ago!
I was the same way. Especially as someone who lives in Texas and is surrounded by those types. Not to give anything away but it is closer to mobster than evangelicals.
My first job out of university.
Company is going through financial hardship. Boss cancels our collective insurance without telling us. Then the president of the company does a meeting in a shady motel reception room to announce to everyone the company isn’t going well and we all need to take a 10% pay cut. Ends the PowerPoint presentation with a photo from our major client’s ads with a lady on a beach with a laptop. President says “oh that’s going to be me in a few weeks. I’ll be going to Greece!”
The whole room just say there silent.
Fuck the rich.
Not a specifically bad instance, but everywhere I’ve worked has always had that guy who has a hundred irrelevant questions at the end of a meeting, holding up 10 or so people from actually getting on with work.
Training classes in the military was the bane of my existence when I was in. Always people asking the dumbest questions ever.
I’m the guy that needs to understand shit to move forward, so it’s like 25% dumb questions, 25% insightful questions, 25% pretentious sounding questions and 25% jokes that give white collar people heart attacks.
Don’t you think most people need to understand shit to move on? If you just ask urgent questions, then take time to digest the meeting and ask those insightful followups in a team chat, it filters out the 75% of the crap you were going to say.
Having a reputation as the guy who prolongs meetings with 25% dumb questions and 25% jokes is not a good thing.
I mean a lot of people in meetings have a good idea of what they want the scope of their involvement to be. My curiosity swamps any semblance of scope I might have. I’ve never actually gotten a reply in team chat. I don’t think most people even know it exists. I did get used to sorting out who I needed to be talking to and just hit them up after the meeting, though.
The only time I prolong shit is when I really, really disagree with something. Typically that’s an ethics issue.
Fair enough, I’ve been in those situations, that can be tough
I sit in business requirements meetings for enhancements to some software we use at work, and there’s a guy who feels the need to repeat everything everyone says in his own words (at least twice as many). The meetings used to be 30 mins but they had to extend them to an hour. And we have 2 a week.
Thanks to WFH it means I have 2 hours a week of guaranteed PlayStation time though, so I shouldn’t complain.
Yep. That woman in the case where I work. And you can’t roll your eyes in a meeting, even a Zoom meeting.
But Zoom meetings mean I can - and do - get to message coworkers and shit talk the offender while it’s happening.
Pro tip: Make it a common practice after doing this to always make sure the last message sent at least starts with something innocuous in case you need to share your screen later so the preview in Teams shows doesn’t say “Jesus Christ, Carla is such a…”
Eh, I just ignore her and switch to another window.
Great question Robert. Let’s go ahead and parking lot that for the right time. Make sure you send that to us in your reply to the meeting notes. I don’t want to lose track of it.
We’ll circle back to that.
Former CEO gathers 20-30 of us in the board room, talks about the difficult economy, proceeds to fire everyone.
The silence was deafening.
The meeting ends, he stands at the door expecting us to shake his hand as we leave.
Not a single person shook his hand.
At least he didn’t publicly share what his bonus was going to be for improving the bottom line.
Former, you say?
I worked a night shift at a lobby of some residential building, with another guy patrolling the building.
Some mentally unstable person wound up sitting at the lobby while the guy was on patrol (long story), so I sent him a message explaining the situation as I didn’t want to talk about it in front of the person.
The patrol guy comes back, looks at the person, looks at me and says “so, who’s the psycho?”
Good lord, what an inconsiderate asshole
Plant manager sending out a site wide email saying that we’re doing awesome, and we’re desperately hiring so refer all your friends. One month after layoffs were announced, and those to be layed off still had a month to go.
Unity - “hold my beer”
This was the main example I had in my head when making this post.
I heard this years later by my former boss. He used to work for a company that just announced some lay-offs because work was slow. Right as the lay-offs were being announced the head of the company pulled into the lot with his new Porsche lease. It was terrible timing, but the corporate lease was up and the car was ordered months prior. Just made the owner look especially tone-deaf since the car came the same say as the lay-off announcement.
Why are most of the stories here about dickhead executives
The janitor doesn’t usually have to address an entire room full of people.
I know hating on CEOs is par for the course for Lemmy, and I tend to agree most of the time, but being fair here, it isn’t that often that lower (or even middle) ranking employees have a chance to speak to 10, 20 or 100+ coworkers at the same time.
Depends. I work for a company that uses the SAFe methodology (whether that’s a good thing is a different discussion) there are tons of opportunities for people on the bottom of the org chart to do this.
A lot of the stories are fake, but also a lot of execs are dickheads
that reminds me of a meeting I was in with the CEO of the company I worked for and we went around the room sharing our hobbies. Everyone said things like reading books or baking or playing video games or whatever.
The CEO said collecting vintage cars.
The CEO said collecting vintage cars.
I know people aren’t going to believe this, but honestly, you don’t need to be a bazillionaire to collect vintage cars. It sure helps (a lot!!), but depending upon what he was collecting, you can buy certain classics for (relatively speaking) cheap.
The director at my old company was into classic cars too and we would shoot-the-shit all the time about his cars and mine.
My whole family was into vintage British roadsters. If you’re willing to work a bit and to flip them after you’ve had your fun, all but the first one pay for themselves.
Oh man, British cars are the best/worst for this I feel. I picked up a 72 Midget a couple of years ago, and while it was a shitton of work, it really wasn’t horribly expensive for me to to a full down to bare metal restoration on it.
My old man built a chimera out of a triumph spitfire and tr3 that was the cutest little thing. All swoopy, curvy body with the original leather seats and wire wheels, sounded like thunderous hell coming down the road and did 0 to 60…well, it usually did 0 to 60 if you asked really nice. But holy shit was it a pretty machine.
I’d love to see a picture! You definitely buy a British car for the looks rather than the speed haha. My Midget has some sort of aftermarket exhaust it came with, and it sounds amazing working it up through the gears, even if you’re only doing 50 by the time you’ve hit redline in 3rd.
Celebrities singing Imagine
I completely forgot this happened. 😂 Wow, that was wild.
A bunch of insulated aristocrats starved for attention while the rest of us were getting sick, disabled, and dying.
Our brains suppress extreme cringe memories.
I worked at Cabela’s when it was bought out by Bass Pro. The sale went into effect mid-September, and in October they announced that all Cabela’s locations would be open on Thanksgiving for the first time ever and that ALL employees were required to be at work
On Thanksgiving day, when the employees who had their family time stripped away last minute were on the edge of revolt, the billionaire owner of Bass Pro made us print out and distribute an email he sent to all managers.
It was pictures of him and his family enjoying their Thanksgiving at his estate and a letter from him expressing how important it was to share the day with family and friends.
That’s so disgusting, I’m sorry you had to put up with that shithead
Please tell me there was a mass resignation after that email was sent.
The employees weren’t volunteers. They still had bills to pay.
And that’s why billionaires are bad. In the case of Bass Pro (probably owned by one person), one man directly controls the lives of tens of thousands of employees and there’s no recourse. He buys competing companies and crushes more lives, and makes people watch videos of his fishing trips.
And he literally thinks people love him for it. He sees himself as a benevolent provider.
Working in a European country, went to someone’s leaving party, to celebrate their career after 35+ years in the job. The manager is new, and flies in for the event specially. The whole room is speaking in their local language, the person’s whole extended family is there.
The manager gets up and starts to make a speech, using a lot of English idioms. The speech started out with “35 years?! You get less for murder!”. As a native English speaker, I thought that was actually pretty funny. The guys entire family - not so much.
Honestly, I don’t think this one is necessarily bad. In fact this is relatively light compared to the others here.
I mean… He meant to tell a joke, a good one for those who understand.
Not sure if he was meant to give speech, tho
That’s a cracker. Going to remember that one
Had a teacher tell some students that it’s rude to speak a foreign language in school (an international school)
I had to be this teacher to a bunch of 8 year old Chinese girls who only spoke Mandarin purposefully to ostracize Brazilian girl, the only non Chinese girl in the room.
It was an English speaking international school in mainland China that incouraged speaking primarily in English.
Jake the Snake saying that he knows a joke he shouldn’t tell, the entire audience being like “don’t tell it,” and he told it anyway and lost the whole audience who was with him up to that point. It was the racist/xenophobic one about dropping silverware down the stairs to name your kids. There were a few Chinese people in the audience.
As an Asian person, there’s not much I hate more than jokes about Asian names or accents. Not even because it’s racist and offensive, but it’s just so cheap and hacky. On the other hand, when someone laughs at those jokes, I know that’s a person I want nothing to do with ever.
I love a good offensive joke as much as the next guy, but it’s mostly the same ignorant old cheap shots when it comes to racist jokes. Hurr durr I know the bike thief was black because he left watermelon and fried chicken on the ground. Ok grampa time for your walk.
It’s offensive because it’s the absolute lowest-hanging fruit. It’s the least amount of thought and effort possible to put into a “joke”. Oh, and the bigotry…
Yep. I feel like a good joke needs a bit more effort than just saying “chin chong”. Like, it is a foreign language that has developed in a completely different part of the world, of course it will sound weird to you!
