When folks say it’s just business, it’s sometimes hard for some to understand what that really means.

At the very least, it means it’s nothing personal and no offense or disregard is aimed at the individual. But the thing most forget is that it quite literally means they, as employees, are hired to perform tasks using their skills and talents in exchange for money, and nothing more than just that is supposed to happen.

But vague boundaries set by the company and confusing managerial lingo sometimes blur the definition, making it sound like everyone’s family there, but the end goal ultimately is the bottom line and knifing the employee is just a sacrifice that has to be made. Until it turns back on them.

More Info: Reddit

A company can act business all they like—nobody’s safe from the inevitability that is consequences of your actions. Even more so if it’s tied to nepotism

Image credits: Sora Shimazaki (not the actual photo)

A former employee recalled how they got fired in the most corporate way possible, but it also bit the company straight on the butt afterwards

Image credits: jaketwo91

Image credits: Mikael Blomkvist (not the actual photo)

Image credits: jaketwo91

So, yeah, that guy you fired turned out to be your money printer… yeah… good luck!

Image credits:  Pixabay (not the actual photo)

Redditor u/jaketwo91 recently shared a story from his younger days on r/antiwork, a subreddit dedicated to a movement for exposing corporate lies in corporate disguise and just generally empowering folks who hate their jobs to the core. Among other things.

The story goes that OP used to work at this one Australian company doing salary package processing. One day, the company hired a person who, not two weeks in, had already pulled the “screw this” trick three times. OP thought she wouldn’t last long with that attitude, but, plot twist, she got promoted to team leader. Well, the position changed, but the attitude persisted.

The team leader did a poor job at team leading—so much, in fact, that morale dropped lower than the floorboards and a “safe space super duper no consequences meeting” was organized to tackle the issue. The team leader wasn’t invited because that would have been unprofessional.

During the meeting, OP expressed his concern and spoke against the team leader. But this is where the unprofessionalism began as the higher-up managing the meeting essentially said sike! and ratted on the employee. This in turn brought out some very inappropriate pressure from the team leader, micromanaging the employee to a new level until enough strikes were accumulated to warrant a firing.

Now, OP was a good employee—it was the management that was rotten. You know how it goes. So, sadly, OP was fired for these supposed mistakes, but here’s where the karma train got the memo and went straight for the bottom line.

Image credits: Sparr Risher (not the actual photo)

OP was so good at what he did, there were two specific gold-mine clients who would only speak to him and nobody else. Well, now that OP was gone, they started asking questions, and soon enough, the silver lining to this story developed and the clients dropped the company. And its bottom line along the way.

OP had no intentions of making it into revenge of any sort, but it kinda turned out that way as OP found a better job and good for him! And folks online felt the same way.

The tone of the comment section can actually be described using this one commenter’s remark: Promoting imbeciles above actual talent—classic corporate. There was general talk of nepotism and how the suspicion is that nobody in corporate actually understands how problematic that is. Probably didn’t affect their bottom line enough.

Others suggested going to the competition the clients went to—more specifically, see if the clients can lean on the competitors to hire OP. For more pay, of course. But if OP already has a job that he’s satisfied with, that works too.

Yet others shared similar experiences, with one commenter explaining how they hired someone who became their manager, despite them having more work experience, and everyone left within 6 weeks. Another commenter told a tale of how clients would ask after her constantly after she had been fired for completely made up things (extreme reasons like abuse and the like). The store tanked months later.

Image credits: W O L F Λ R T (not the actual photo)

Bored Panda got in touch with OP for more context on the matter. OP was reminded of his experience after reading an anti-work post about anonymous surveys. This in turn spawned the now-viral post.

“I was quite young then, and didn’t really understand office politics and things like that. I had a lot of stress from handling work that Rachel would offload to me that I frankly wasn’t experienced or mature enough to deal with,” elaborated jaketwo. “But I think the way it caused me to doubt myself was the hardest part. Thinking that maybe I was just not as good at my job as I thought I was, and whether this was just what full time work was going to be like everywhere.”

Unfortunately, OP had no desire to go “fixing things” because he tried to do that in his previous job and it didn’t go well. The manager was much worse there, one who would single out people and call them “disgraceful” and “useless” in emails meant for the entire floor. “That previous experience made me just want to move on and try to find a better place rather than trying to fix where I’m at. I think it was the best choice for me as well,” added OP.

He continued: “I think that situations like the one I found myself in are a symptom of a broken system. If people escalate issues with a terrible manager and it’s not taken seriously. I would suggest just move on and find somewhere else ASAP. I found a much better job not long after, and I’m coming up on my 11th anniversary with that company in October. Where I’ve worked my way from being an administrator to a business analyst. If a company doesn’t value the work you do, find somewhere that does.”

OP did have that particular schadenfreude feeling (a lot of it, in fact) from hearing that this whole situation affected the company negatively, but that was enough for OP. Anything more (from petty revenge to malicious compliance) would have felt like unnecessary overkill.

Image credits: KOMUnews (not the actual photo)

On a slightly different note, can managers get fired for lying? The short answer is yes. After all, they’re employees like any other. However, most bad managers don’t really play by the rules and so they can just flat out lie enough to keep their tracks covered and they usually fly low on the radar anyway because reasons.

Weekly Update explains that bad managers often aren’t held accountable for two reasons: they don’t enforce certain goals and tracking methods to even see any problems, but also if there’s one or two employees that exceed the expectation while everyone else slacks off, it evens itself out across the team and so everything is calm in Manager Town.

But also, bad managers aren’t always truthful about their teams’ performance. They can sweep issues under the rug and don’t escalate employee concerns—enough for higher-ups to not notice.

Lastly, there is a little bit of positioning and manipulation involved on the part of bad managers. By that, Weekly Update means that managers tend to keep key domain knowledge next to them and position themselves as irreplaceable assets. And anyone above in the chain of command will quite likely not bother to dig deeper to see if it’s just a facade or not.

This can, however, blow up in their face. Keeping up a lie demands a lot of dedication and tracking, and can be exhausting in the long run. Sooner or later, some things might pile up, surface and become so obvious, management will have to intervene. Or so the hope is.

Intermission over.

The post got a modest amount of upvotes, compared to what most r/antiwork posts get, clocking in at a bit over 4,500 upvotes with a 99% positivity rate. You can read all of it in context here. But don’t do that just yet as we would love to hear some of your bad manager stories in the comment section below!

Folks loved the karmic conclusion, pointing out the best definition of a corporate mistake: promoting imbeciles above actual talent—classic corporate

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