I used to work in logistics, fast-paced, decent pay, and a culture that prided itself on “resilience” (read: burnout). The kind of place where people brag about not taking sick days.
Last year, I got a call at work from my sister: my dad had collapsed and was being rushed to hospital. It wasn’t just serious, it was end-of-life serious. The kind of moment where everything else drops away.
I told my manager I needed to leave immediately. His exact words were, “Is there any chance this can wait until after the 4PM dispatch?”
I just stared at him and said, “No.”
He looked annoyed but waved me off.
I got to the hospital just in time. My dad passed away that night. I don’t remember much except being grateful I didn’t listen to the voice in my head telling me to “not cause trouble.”
When I came back a week later, everything had changed. My team was cold. I wasn’t invited to meetings I used to run. During my next review, my manager said, “We need to work on your reliability.”
That word stuck in my chest like glass.
I left a month later. Took a role with less money and fewer perks, but at least I’m treated like a human being.
So I’m asking the rest of you:
When was your moment, the one that made you realise your job, your manager, or even your entire workplace didn’t actually give a sh*t about you?
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I saw how 2 different industries treated my parents and never believed in “company love” or whatever people call it.
Never work a minute for free
I returned from literal war back to my job.
3 days in, my manager took me for a talk about how I was not as efficient as I was prior to the few months I spent fighting.
I was still doing 100% of my tasks, the only thing I didn’t do? Help others complete their tasks.
I immediately went to her boss for that though and he was a lot kinder. First of all he allowed me unlimited paid “mental health days” so if I feel overwhelmed I could either work from home or rest. And he urged me to take 2 weeks for myself immediately.
He also paid for a therapist for me and paid me to go to her.
Beyond that every time I returned to fight he made sure my unit was sent clothes, and food and whatever we needed. He also made sure food was sent to my significant other to make her days without me easier.
My boss was horrible, her boss? A literal amazing person. He also recommended me for a promotion which I got thanks to him.
I work as a Supervisor in a call center for a credit card servicing provider, some of my coworkers with the same job title as me are definitely being underpaid for what we have to deal with. When I took the job, I got the highest hourly rate that was going to be offered for this position, but that’s only because I’m in the New York metro area.
Given the kind of crap we have to deal with when we get escalated calls, it really makes me wonder why someone would do what I do for any less than what I took this job for. Anal QA, abuse from callers, and upper management that seems totally removed from reality.
That being said, at least my direct supervisor is pretty chill. Actually, all of them on our team are pretty chill.
I’m very sorry about your dad, OP, sending you a virtual hug.
In my case, I worked at McDonald’s one summer when I was a teenager and that’s when I understood that companies only care about money and I always remember that. I am very professional and all, I take my job very seriously, but I never forget that I’m working for companies and that if I were to die tomorrow, they would replace me the next day. So I try to prioritize myself and my wellbeing, and I try to work with people who do the same.
I work for a home health care agency in a non-clinical role. My job involves requesting authorizations from insurance companies for services. As such, I have access to patient data from not only patients who have come on service with us, but any patient who has ever been registered at one of the hospitals that are also part of our larger organization. We receive yearly training on PHI/PII, HIPAA, all that crap. I have over 10 years of experience in the healthcare field, so I know the type of information that I have access to and don’t take it lightly. I’ve never received any disciplinary action prior to this or since.
A little less than a year ago, I was wrongfully accused of searching the name of (very well known New England sports figure who frequents shady massage parlors). This is an offense that at bare minimum involves termination. It was a 20-minute ordeal where my immediate supervisor and my boss grilled me over Teams and looked at me as if I were a criminal. I lost sleep over it because I was told they would arrive at a decision by the end of the day, which did not happen. After our privacy department actually did their jobs and ruled me innocent, my immediate supervisor did apologize. To this day, my boss has not apologized and she never will. She acts as if it never happened.
Age 14. Bussing tables in a Chinese restaurant for under the table money. Those dudes didn’t even give a shit about themselves, much less me.
They pay me in exchange for my services. Nowhere in there is the implication they actually care for me. I never thought “caring for” was part of the equation.
When they were more worried about me suing than if I was alright
I have never worked at a job where I believed for a single minute that they care about me as a person, because they don’t. Also, I saw my dad get chewed up and spit out for an industry he was in for fifty years like it was the most natural thing in the world. It’s never going to happen for me (especially working the shitty jobs I’ll be lucky to still have for the rest of my life) and I would be an idiot to expect otherwise.
They never do. They only care about what they can get out of you so sometimes they pretend they care
Never expirienced that. And I sincerely hope the people that I employ now don’t feel like that.
I never thought that my employers gave a damn about me. I was there to do a job and get paid for doing it. If I disappeared off the face of the Earth, the company would just move on.
When the person next to me died. His area was cleaned out that day and a new person was there in a week. I mean, what else are you going to do, right? But still, you get disappeared pretty quick. Don’t die at your desk. Its extra work for everyone.
Here companies need to give you 3x documented warnings before being allowed to fire you. One place I worked at decided they wanted to get rid of me so they gave me impossible tasks.
The free pizza after working 14 hours was my villain origin story.
The culture in a company begins at the top. You should only go beyond the call of duty if it is reciprocal. Be glad you learned this lesson young.
When they asked why I stood with my legs crossed alot and I told them I had a bad hernia and it helped the pain. I was working through a staffing agency suddenly the next day “I was no longer needed”.
I gave 11 years of my life to a job in manufacturing. Over the 1st 6 years I gave it everything I had, 6 day weeks, 10-12+ hours a day at the behest of my family. The last 5 years I was a supervisor and continued to try and do the same, and at times it was truly just me giving it my all because I kept telling myself I needed to be the one to lead by example.
The last 10 months, new management came in. They hadn’t been there and seen what I’d given and treated me like everything that went wrong was obviously my fault even though their incompetence was to blame. I had been unhappy for a few years before that, but I finally snapped and decided I was done. I applied for a job close to home on a Friday, was immediately offered the position and then called in “sick” with Covid the following week so I could get paid for my week of sick time that the company doesn’t pay upon separation. After that week I went in to grab my personal tools and sent my Chat GpT letter of resignation to HR from a starbucks while enjoying a warm summer morning. I got paid for the week of sick time and the 3 weeks of vacation I had accrued 😊. Best decision of my adult life!
Handed my notice in after ten years and nobody, as in nobody at all, talked to me for my notice period of three months. My boss called on the afternoon of my last day to say “sorry, I’ve been busy but good luck in whatever you’re going to do” and then hung up because he was late for something.
about a month ago, my car blew her engine. i was stuck having to borrow wheels to get to work and Ubering everywhere else. thankfully i’m in a better vehicle now!
literally only three people ever said as much as “hey man, that sucks, what happened?”: the assistant manager, my coworker, and a regular customer. my boss, who until this point had me thinking he was a nice empathetic person, only cared to the point that i was finding a way in so he didn’t have to cover on graveyard shift. no “i’m sorry”, no “what happened”, nothing. just “you’re coming in right?”.
When I got a new job that did.
When i asked for a raise after doing work of 2 person for a year + when my mom died, after a week they were already asking me a couple times when i will come back to work.
Jobs are like being in the military. You might help out your fellow coworker or soldier. Never go to battle for the company or the government.
I got into a car accident on the way to work, I tried to call off. My supervisor asked if I was OK, I said yes but a little shaken up. She said well I really need you to come in. I didn’t feel bad when I heard she had a heart attack.
It would have to be the first time I ever got legit fired (not just laid off as part of restructuring).
I was 25, literally breaking my ass for this job as a manager. I worked 14 hr days, 6 days a week for barely $500 a week. Zero time for dating or much else. And when I was seeing someone, all I wanted was food, rest, and sex .. in that order.
Long story short – I told the director about a person taking time off on the day we were supposed to have this massive event. He acknowledged but failed to find a replacement. The weeks go by, the day of the event is here, the replacement was never scheduled. We called someone in at the 11th hour as we were coordinating vendors, food, space for setting up, and handling the technical issues that kept popping up. It was somewhat smooth on the front-end, but a shit show behind the scenes.
After it all went down, the aforementioned director tells me, in no uncertain terms, to “hand in my keys and gtf out of the building.” Never taking accountability for his failure.
To this day, I have held a grudge and a distrust against management and it has served me well. I will say, at my current job, I have an amazing manager and work with great people. But that kind of trauma rewires your brain.
I was never under that impression to begin with
I worked for a mental health not-for-profit. I realised they didn’t care when my manager wouldn’t give me leave to care for my Dad who was really sick – he was end of life sick too.
I needed to be there for him and my Mum who was absolutely frantic and distressed.
I was in hopeful negotiations, when I saw my team leader missed out on saying goodbye to his Dad before he passed – because our Manager talked him out of it when his Mum rang to say his Dad was on his deathbed.
This is something he will have to live with for the rest of his life.
So I quit. My manager declared I had to work 4 weeks notice, even though I was paid fortnightly. My Dad passed on a few months later. I was grateful I was able to spend time with him and help him before that and just wish I’d quit earlier.
Worked in a chinese restaurant when i was 17. Cleaning the floors, washrooms, scrubbing pots and food prep.
A buddy of mine got me the job because he was leaving it.
After my first week the owner told me i was too slow, that my buddy was faster.
The reason my buddy was faster was that he never cleaned the public washrooms , they stunk.
I was “the everything guy” for an organisation. Whatever needed doing. I also made myself the Alarm call out guy so I would get the call if the alarm wasn’t armed or someone broke in. Why? Because I felt like I could be more flexible and take a day off if my phone rang in the middle of the night.
So I was basically on call 24 /7 mostly because I was a massive caretaker. But I believed in the mission and I thought the people who were making it happen were my friends. And you help your friends. Right?
When I finally left that job after nearly a decade, my phone never rang again. My “friends” weren’t at all interested in me once I couldn’t do anything for them anymore.
They were never my friends.
I think when you find a job that actually cares about you it becomes readily apparent that your previous jobs didn’t. For me I didn’t realize just how awful my previous boss was until I got laid off during covid and ended up at a new place with a boss who was significantly better.
The company started an entire line of business that they couldn’t support, took in tens of millions of dollars in payments that they could never honor, and I was hired to work between the operations and the sales.
The situation went on for over a year. I highlighted this and initiated a committee to bridge the leadership gap between both sides of the organization, going up three levels from my current level. I brought clarity to the entire org. It became obvious that we had to let an entire department go.
Come annual review, I was not recognized for this effort, and I was told that I would not be getting even a cost of living raise because people were upset with me. They also told me I had to start coming into the office more often.
I took a job paying twice as much and fired them in a one-on-one.