I don't know, the concert tickets line is pretty impressive.
"Nothing must interfere with the teaching of professional norms. Look up her home address by sneaking onto a computer in Human Resources and stand outsider her house all night so you can catch her first thing as she leaves the house on the morning of her graduation."
"Report her actions to the school she's graduating from so they revoke her degree for such unprofessional behavior."
We can only assume that this stunning employee went on a full scholarship, as otherwise the graduation ceremony would have been paid for.
I agree the concert ticket line was the best- there was cost, don't you see, nothing so bland as attending a ceremony for something you've worked for (and paid for) over several years.
And not that I'm saying this is obvious, I am somewhat curious about the race of the manager and the employee (and maybe the concert-going employee too.) There's some serious underlying condescension there that smells of race-related stuff.
I don't know about race, but the manager is voting for Trump.
Not to mention the incredibly condescending paternalism that this highly competent employee needs the smart boss to chase after her and explain to her how to adult.
Ok then, so we've almost certainly established the manager is white.
As someone who spent the last two years managing a small team of retail workers, this is .... ridiculous. It is the manager's job to make sure the shifts are adequately covered. If an employee comes to you with an issue, you solve it. YOU ask around to make sure someone covers it. YOU call in the personal favour if they won't do it just because it's the right thing to do. YOU make sure you have great employees working for you because you're a great person to work for. That is like, 50% of the entire job. Probably more. (And something that, unfortunately, my previous employers did not really get, and which is a huge part of the reason I no longer work there.)
That letter is terrible to the point of being almost unbelievable -- I wonder if the boss wrote it, or if the employee being screwed wrote it for the satisfaction of seeing a reaction to the boss's behavior.
It's not uncommon for the best/hardest working employee to essentially get screwed over by consistently being expected to be there for the hard bits, taking the hardest jobs, picking up the slack for fellow employees, etc - but to be treated so unfairly!?
And yes, LB, I kind of wondered the same thing.
It's gotta be fake. No one would actually support Trump.
11 is why I'm a lazy-ass motherfucker at work. Nobody's coming to me to do the hard stuff.
That's outrageous. From comments there this one about the boss demanding employees be tested to see if they are a compatible kidney donor for his liver-cancer suffering brother is about as bad: http://www.askamanager.org/2016/04/our-boss-will-fire-us-if-we-dont-sign-up-to-be-a-liver-donor-for-his-brother.html
Or worse. They're all horrible. I was trying to find another post about someone trying to spend an older coworkers retirement but couldn't find it. Shitheads all.
Yeah, this letter seems even faker than Penthouse forum-type stuff. Zero chance it is real.
Maybe that whole site is fake letters. (I am comforting myself with that thought while I think about idiotic managers.)
I had the same thought, but then found an anodyne letter about negotiations that no one would go to the trouble of faking. The liver one is something no reasonable person would believe without evidence, but I don't think its presence flips every other letter from true to false.
I worked for a prof who kind of fired a postdoc for attending his PhD graduation. The guy had been taking an "unreasonable" amount of vacation, including the Memorial Day and 4th of July (!), and he wanted to return home to England to walk in the ceremony. The boss told him he wouldn't have a job upon return. The coworker asked whether he was being fired, and the prof said something like, "No, I'm just saying you won't have a job upon your return." He went after arranging a postdoc, starting upon his return, with another professor in the department.
The only thing that seems fake is that I can't imagine that kind of person wanting to "help" someone out in their future career and caring enough to write a letter to an advice site.
Oh no, that part of it really rang true to me. It's not an actual desire to help, it's a desire to reassert insulted authority over a person the manager had been (seemingly) taking advantage of, and enjoying unquestioned superiority over, for a number of years. A little act of revenge, and the letter-writing is a search for vindication. Very, very psychologically realistic.
I was surprised though that people took the manager to be male; I assumed reading the whole thing that it was a woman. The contemptuous petty tyrant fast food manager in "Roger & Me" haunts my nightmares.
the manager told me why all the ex-GM workers had been fired: "Many of them say this is a lot of hard work... because assembly work is easy. It depends on what you make it. At Taco Bell, every day's a new day. Every time you turn around, it's a different challenge. Fast food is one of the most stressful environments... because of the demands on you. Fast food demands a fast pace... because we want to present a food item... within so many seconds, if we can do it. The transaction [sic?] from assembly work and the fast pace at Taco Bell... Some of them just couldn't develop that speed."
21 accords with what I thought when I read it.
The stereotypical male-low-level tyrant in my brain would just content himself with the knowledge that his ex-employee will have to search for work with either no reference for their last job or that he could get his revenge by, on being called for a reference, saying "not eligible for rehire."
I'm surprised so many people are questioning the authenticity of the OP link. It rings pretty true to me as the product of a certain type of petty authoritarian who isn't smart enough to recognize how absurd their behavior sounds.
Lowest seniority is someone who's been working there six years and the other employees are friends outside of work? Sounds like a stagnant shit workplace where the person who quit probably couldn't wait to get out and not look back.
It's kind of unbelievable that the comments are universally against the manager. Where are the neoliberals!
The overall picture is pretty plausible. It's just that the details were so perfectly maximally aggravating that I'm inclined to think it's fake.
21: You might be right. Given that I actually worked for someone who did something like that, I couldn't imagine him wanting to follow up with the actual employee. In my case, the firings were followed by scorched earth departmental gossip and pretending that the former postdoc or grad student did not exist (no eye contact, no speech, no acknowledgement). Your read makes sense for a different sort, though. A tough love sadist.
"It's not uncommon for the best/hardest working employee to essentially get screwed over by consistently being expected to be there for the hard bits, taking the hardest jobs, picking up the slack for fellow employees, etc - but to be treated so unfairly!?"
This is my experience too. Let's say it is a holiday and you don't get holiday time and a half. If you volunteer to come in when you weren't scheduled, you get 0 benefit, whereas if you don't volunteer and offer to cover someone's shift, you build up IOUs from your coworkers.
"Lowest seniority is someone who's been working there six years and the other employees are friends outside of work? Sounds like a stagnant shit workplace where the person who quit probably couldn't wait to get out and not look back."
I was assuming there were gaps in the 6-year period due to school. IE quit for a semester or summer. And had to restart at the bottom.
What's so hard to believe about the OP? Or even 15. It's just a test, and they'd get the rest of the day off. If the test showed they were compatible, presumably the employer and/or their relative would try to negotiate an equitable deal for the organ, in which continued employment would be just one thing on the table. Employers used to shoot striking workers; this is just a return to form.
/bob
Lowest seniority is someone who's been working there six years and the other employees are friends outside of work? Sounds like a stagnant shit workplace where the person who quit probably couldn't wait to get out and not look back.
Because everyone who works there has been there for at least six years, that suggests it's a BAD place to work?
Because it sounds like a bad work environment and yet people are apparently not going anywhere. I was assuming the bad work environment from the original letter, with the six years and everyone else being fine with the workplace making it worse for the woman who quit.
Well it WAS a good work environment because there was someone always ready to cover for you when you needed to take a couple of hours or a day.
33: The fact that the manager won't let a good employee go to their graduation makes it sound like a bad place to work. The fact that everyone has been there at least six years is weird and ambiguous, IMO.
I've never seen a place where that's the case, good or bad. When I try to picture one, all I can come up with is a very small, very static family-owned-and-operated business. (But even in families, teens grow up and stuff.) Reliable client (or customer or whatever) base, but no room for growth in the industry or market. I can't even think about what kind of industry it would be in. The workplace in the OP sounds like tech support or some other kind of IT, but aren't people always coming and going there due to how competitive the industry is? In general, if a job is big enough to have middle management, then there's going to be someone who wants to move up somewhere.
In my current job, I know several people have been hired within the past six months in addition to me. At my previous job, about five people stayed more than three years (counting myself) and I only became the most senior employee three months before I left (depends what counts), but at least five more people didn't last three years. At the job before that, I was only there two and a half years and at least two other people had similarly short tenures (although some people have been there 10 years). Before that, we're into stuff that was seasonal or temp work.
Being junior at six years seems more likely in a mostly family or otherwise close-knit place, and once you're assuming that, it seems more likely that a place like that would be bad if you aren't in the in-group, yes.
My previous workplace had a lot of long time employees, including people in the 30-40 year range, and it was mostly a good work environment and my colleagues in my department were great, but the institution overall did have a stagnant feeling. Still, you could see changes happening slowly, and people did cover for each other pretty generously.