Kinda reminds me of Robert Baratheon …. and the 3 million golden dragons he owed from overspending.

EDIT: I have been gleefully corrected….we elected Joffrey, not Robert.

And….Arya—the character that shows ordinary people can become heroes.

“Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Declares National Emergency to Increase our Competitive Edge, Protect our Sovereignty, and Strengthen our National and Economic Security The White House”. April 2, 2025

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-declares-national-emergency-to-increase-our-competitive-edge-protect-our-sovereignty-and-strengthen-our-national-and-economic-security/

https://fortune.com/2025/04/02/reid-hoffman-says-the-best-founders-dont-have-work-life-balance-anything-short-means-theyre-not-committed-to-winning/

Winning for who?

Something is wrong with recruiters and recruitment. In what diseased brain is it a problem to hire someone with *too many* qualifications? People can't win. Either not qualified enough, or *too* qualified.

This entire process is utterly, irrevocably broken.

This has happened to me twice this week. I ask any detailed information about a position before getting in a business suit and driving to an interview. These are general questions about hours, benefits, or weekends since I have another job.

The hiring manager blows me off entirely and says "we will discuss that in person.".

The one job was posted as "weekdays". This is good because I work weekends. I asked the hiring manager before my interview if it included days on the weekends because I can't do weekends. He wouldn't tell me.

He brings me in instead and tells me today it's 5-9 weekdays and "whenever they need me on the weekends". He says if I can't commit to that I can't work there.

If he had just told me that, I wouldn't have interviewed and wasted both our time.

Another job had no information about benefits. I had to go in, sit down, ask about benefits and basically say "Oh ok thanks bye" and leave.

Why waste everyone's time? Do these companies enjoy this?

A few weeks back i finally quit a job that was underpaying, overworking and asking us to do sketchy/straight up illegal things (Not having permits, no PPE etc).

While i was there, more than once, they pretty much made it clear they considered me expendable and they'd let me go to hire someone else if i didn't "fit their culture".
So there was definitely a little schadenfreude today when they called up to ask if i could come do a job for them.

Too bad i know the reason no one there will do the job they're asking for is because, surprise, it's both illegal and unsafe again. Wonder why they've having so much trouble finding a replacement?

I rage quit my job of many years 16 months ago, the last straw being my boss telling me I was “insubordinate” for using FMLA to escort my crippled father to a doctor’s appointment, six months after the health incident that crippled him.

I’m laying in bed this morning and my phone vibrates. I check the number and see it’s the HR number for my former employer. It’s also about an hour before the HR department started their day when I was there, so rather ofd.

I answer, and the woman on the other end doesn’t give her name, instead saying “This is [Name of former employer] from Employee Services,” so it sounds like the anthropomorphic personification of my former employer works in HR and is calling me.

My first thought is that this is related to a job application I put in weeks ago with a sister company of the business that owned my previous employer. My former employer is notorious for rehiring people who should never be rehired, including someone whose stupidity almost caused a fire in a building that could have spread to where patients are treated.

I figured applying to the other company might be possible. Instead, I found out that people who almost racked up a body count are rehireable, while people who use FMLA have their personal external account blackmarked through every company owned by the parent business so it gets locked if they ever apply again, complete with a pop-up telling them their account is now locked.

But it wasn’t about that.

I was informed they were cleaning out my “personal effects” and needed to confirm my shipping address. After I did so Little Miss Anthropomorphic Representation lets out the most exasperated noise and complains how “Facilities or somebody” is cleaning out my desk and so she was put upon to contact me. Then she hangs up.

Here’s the thing. About a year before I quit I made sure I had no personal effects at the facility. I had seen what a half-ass job they’ve done in the past returning stuff to people, including just throwing out stuff of people they didn't like, and knew whenever I left I was unlikely to get my stuff back.

I’m honestly left wondering if someone got laid off or fired recently, they somehow got confused with me, and I’m going to get whatever they left behind. When I was there I was mistaken for other employees, both male and female, so often you’d have thought you were watching a sitcom.

I guess I’ll find out whose stuff I’m getting when the surprise package arrives.

Sitting in the backseat of my car enjoying the peace as we speak. No one is in the office but me today and tomorrow.

I work in a small insurance agency. The agent, my boss, is out of the country as well as one of my other coworkers. Then my other coworker called off today because her son hurt himself last night, and tomorrow she was already off on the account of family visiting. So it’s just me myself and I.

Two main things I’m doing my way while everyone is out: My breaks and opening when we’re actually supposed to, not just because we’re physically in the office.

My two coworkers will turn our sign around to “open” when we get here at 8:30AM, even though we don’t actually open until 9AM and I HATE that! So that’s not happening when I’m the only one here. When I’m the one holding down the fort, it’s my rules. I don’t open until 9AM, as our publicly posted hours clearly state. Just because we’re here doesn’t mean we should service customers before we’re technically open. That 30 minutes is for US! To make coffee, get settled in, etc. not for customers. They have from 9am-5pm. That is plenty of damn time.

As for my breaks? My two coworkers, quite often, take however long they want for their breaks, so it’s my turn.

I’m also working at my own pace. If the phone rings 5 damn seconds after I hang up with a customer? I’m not picking that up. When everyone else is here they expect me to pick up every call, even if I can’t take a damn breath between them. Well not on my watch. I’m not working like a damn automatic assembly line.

I love working in the office solo!

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/s/5abhOqRjKY

I just wanted to provide a small update on how this turned out, as it was a little funny actually. I also wanted to thank everyone for their suggestions and kind words in my original post, too. I was really fried and didn't know what to do in this situation as a recent grad in my first full time position.

Pretty directly after making that original post, I decided to contact my doctor for a note to seek medical exemption from the yard work day. I have asthma and informed my doctor of the situation, who promptly sent me the note and agreed with my thoughts of how bullshit the whole situation was.

The next day, I caught up with our HR coordinator and handed him the note after our morning meeting. I told him I assumed he was who I should hand a doctor's note to and he confirmed it. When I was walking away from the time clock to punch out for my lunch, he called to me from his office and let me know that he had processed the note and that I was good to go on Friday, no issues or questions thankfully! I didn't tell me supervisor, the director, anything and just pretended like everything was normal.

Then last Friday rolls around, the day they had decided would be the day we would begin doing our yard work and landscaping - also with "complimentary" free lunch on behalf of our director who had been the original person to decide we would be doing it - and also separate from our second designated mulching day we would also plan on arranging the morning of yard work days number one.

I showed up in my regular work clothes and acted like it was just another normal day. Before our morning meeting, I overheard from one of the Administrative office workers talking to another person from a different department that three people had called out, including one of the people they runs the place, who claimed to have an appointment that day. They both seemed pissed reasonably so and I was already seething from the stupidity of it all. That meant we were down half the normal office heads and the people who were expected to do lawn an landscaping work but that's okay! We would still persevere and everything was continued to be planned normally! (As shared by supervisor.) No one said anything to me and I worked like normal back in my office the rest of the day. When I left work later on, it looked like the lawn had not been touched at all and I had heard nothing about the free lunch (not that I truthfully cared and I didn't contribute to the insanity anyways). Monday rolls around and it was just like like usual with no mentions of the call offs and nothing about the lawn work. No one's said anything about mulch day thus far. Wondering if maybe those call offs finally got through to her or if someone finally said something? I never asked and never brought it up again.

Today I just got informed I'll be getting a formal job offer at a big, local university in a job actually related to my degree and I'm ecstatic! Actual livable pay, benefits and commutable from home. Handing in my two weeks notice pronto and waffling on just walking out. But I'll definitely be leaving a nice, long honest review of my time spent here on Glassdoor and Indeed.

TL:DR- I got a note from my doctor regarding my asthma limiting me from doing heavy labor outside and handed it into HR with no fuss surprisingly and on day 1 of lawn work a bunch of people called out, including one of the people that runs the place which pissed everyone off. Never heard how things unfolded and it appears no one even did any lawn work!

As the title says, my team has taken away work from home Fridays. I signed a year contract in January, planned my whole year around being flexible to travel Thursdays and work remote on Fridays, just for it to be taken away 3 months in.

Why? Because apparently ppl were taking their calls from other cities on Fridays. Isn’t that the whole point?! Sooo I guess WFH means I MUST be in my home, I can’t go to a cafe or coworking space?

You want me on a Friday, I will be late, hungover and doing the bare minimum. I feel like I’m being punished for no reason. all motivation to be involved or motivated to do good work is out the window.

Do I even need to repeat it? The age old, tired utterance that is used whenever an employee prioritizes their well being over their job, or demonstrates reluctance to do extra work for zero extra compensation.

Ironically, the people who use this phrase will also accuse an employee of entitlement if the employee suggests people working 40-50 hours a week should have no trouble affording the basic necessities of life.

Aside from that, it's just a plain old stupid thing to say. Of course I don't wanna work. You're telling me if you won half a billion dollars you'd show up Monday morning after spending the weekend eagerly waiting to come in at 6 am sharp to turn a crank for 10 hours? 🤣

Not wanting to work doesn't mean you're lazy, or that you WON'T work, or even that you reject the reality that, at this point in history, we must work. All it means is that you'd rather be doing something else and I'm sick of the stigma. But I'm preaching to the choir.

The end of the day really left a bad taste in my mouth. I busted my ass, more than doubled my expected output. But my boss hit me with that line when I didn't wanna stay an extra 4 hours to help him earn HIS bonus. Anyway, I'm done now. Rant over

My daughter has autism and my boss knows that. I requested time off to take her to a therapy evaluation and was denied due to “no staff to cover that day”. If you’ve ever had to schedule therapy evaluation for a child you know that these appointment are usually months wait and hard to reschedule unless you want to wait another few months. I put in another request to just have two hours off of the time to take her to the evaluation and I would come back (trying to be accommodating) and was also denied so I’m calling out. I’m a very loyal employee and one of the best staff members they have (words out of their own mouth). i’m shocked they’re couldn’t work with me. Not making much hourly at that.

Should I call in saying i’m sick or should I just simply say that I won’t be in and leave it at that?

Do you take mental health days and how do you tell your supervisor?

I reminded him -- because this was not the first time something like this has happened -- that I am not his personal assistant. So he fired me. I packed my shit and left. Two minutes later he called me and asked to talk, so I turned around.

We talked. He said he was asking me to do that as a friend, not as his personal assistant.

I pointed out that we are not friends, we are employer/employee. We do not socialize, we do not call/text each other, we have not been invited to the others' house, etc.

He told me he had an accident the night before and slept in the office last night. I said (basically), "Okay, so what does that have to do with you expecting me to handle your personal business?"

He called me arrogant and started swearing. I got up and said "we're done here". He then fired me (again). I almost asked him if he was firing me as a friend or as an employer.

Had two interviews today and applied to six new jobs. One potential employer called the company owner right then and there, while the owner was on his vacation, to talk about me, so that's promising.

Stand your ground, folks.

For context, my Employer normally does Interest-Based Bargaining (IBB) and it's with the whole suite of upper management. I personally have no experience with IBB, but from what I have heard, it's bad and a waste of time. Only works when both parties act in good faith. We opted for traditional bargaining, and it freaked our employer out into hiring two attorneys to represent them in bargaining. They probably make $200/hr, if not more. So now it's 99% lawyers talking with silent head nodding from upper management.

The lawyers have told us plainly that they don't know our contract that well. They need a lot of handholding to understand the basics of our working conditions and contract. For instance, they didn't know what shrink is.

Grocery shrink is unsellable food that gets passed down to staff. At our store, 75% goes to shelters and 25% to staff. It's mostly stale bread and moldy produce. We proposed that we get more packaged shrink (ie. more prepared foods items, higher quality food) because so many of our staff rely on shrink for food since we are paid so poorly.

At the end of bargaining, the lead attorney said "Next meeting is at dinner time, so you guys better bring your shrink!" Like haha you guys are poor and have to rely on rotten food to survive. So awful.

At least we can tell workers about it and feed the rage machine.

I’m not talking about the usual bad boss, weird hours, or toxic culture (though those count too). I mean a job that truly felt like it was operating in a parallel dimension — where the business model made no sense, leadership spoke in corporate word salad, the product was barely real (or not real at all), and every day felt like an improv cult workshop disguised as a job.

Ever been paid well but asked to work on something that had no clear purpose? Or been told you were “changing the world” while sitting in meetings for a product that didn’t actually exist?

Curious to know if anyone else has experienced something like this. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I went through — but I’ll share my story once I hear a few of yours.

Let’s hear the weirdest, most “what the hell is happening” job you’ve ever had.

Title basically explains it. We’ve always had an ability to work from home when necessary (weather, sickness, etc) but now all of a sudden that has been taken away. We’ve only found out because a colleague asked to work from home because they were sick. They were told that’s no longer an option and they would have to use PTO. It’s so frustrating and cowardly. Being able to work from home when I’ve needed to has been such a blessing but can’t have that!

Last week I was brought into an hr meeting with an hr rep and the second in command of my department. I was asked if my boss said or did certain things, for example I was asked if she had ever talked about “managing people out” of the department if they didn’t fit in. I was honest with all my answers. Well this morning at 9am I had my weekly check in meeting (we are a remote company), surprise surprise a member of hr, my boss, and her flying monkey let me know I was being let go…..coincidence? I think not

I got into an argument with my manager today because I have a teammate who hasn’t done the the “progression presentation” that we have to do to be promoted to the next level.

My manager wants the guy to train others, which is not a responsibility at his level but it is at the next level up. So I said that if you want him to train then you need to be prepared to promote him to compensate him for the extra effort. To which my manager said that if he wants the promotion then he has to be already operating at the next level up(without extra pay).

Then my manager proceeded to tell me that “this job is not about the money” and “I don’t hve any respect for someone who doesn’t consider this a career.”

I replied that that’s not reasonable. Everyone works for money. If they didn’t pay me enough I wouldn’t work for them. You cannot ask someone to do extra work for the promise that they might have a better chance of a promotion, especially since he just admitted that he has no respect for any of my team.