FMFood Hogging-Coworker

Every week we would have a potluck at our school.

There was one teacher who, without fail, would take home all the leftovers. (She’d also completely raid the fridge on Friday afternoon as if it constituted her weekly grocery shopping trip.)

If a member of the teaching staff had a party, it was a given that she’d take home all the leftover birthday cake. As though no one else likes extra cake?

Now, I think it’s horrible to waste food. But I know for a fact that many other people on staff also wanted to take food home. Unfortunately, this person wasn’t very easy to reason with.

As the years passed, she continued her food-hoarding ways, growing both in girth and selfishness.

In the end, the only thing I ever saw her leave behind in the staff room was her divorce papers.

Which was possibly even more awkward than her stealing, come to think of it…

-Anonymous, Teacher

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FMOffice Chat

At my work, we’re all expected to be on office chat at all times. We have the cheap version, though, which doesn’t save any conversations, so we always use it to bitch to each other.

My boss’s name starts with an S. My closest work friend is an R. One day I’d had a chat going with R about how totally worthless management was (both our jobs during that time period were basically “try the same old thing and pretend we’re going to get results, then take the blame when, inevitably, we don’t get results”). I was about to head to the bathroom, so I closed the window, then I thought of one last thing to mention:

“But you know she’s going to obsess over every detail on it, anyway, even though it won’t make any difference.”

My boss wrote back: “wrong message window?”

I shot her back a message claiming I’d been talking about a mutual friend’s wedding planning…then got chewed out for using chat for personal convos. Whatever, better than the alternative.

-Laura S., Public Relations

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FMSoundtrack

I was listening to the creepy orgy music from the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack to add a bit of thrill to my Excel drudgery in the middle of a crowded office.

About a minute in, I looked around and noticed stares of utter shock coming from every direction.

I realized I’d forgotten to plug in my earphones.

–Anonymous Rex, “Corporate America to the MAX”

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FMBoss’s Travel Schedule

The owner of my company is mostly hands-off, but there are a few elements he’s still really invested in. One of the biggest ones is the spring product line brochure we send out every fall.

We’re a pretty small company, so we do the brochure in house. Which means I pretty much do all the work. We hold lots of meetings about how we want it to look, which products we want to feature prominently, etc. etc. way in advance, and I keep checking in with all the higher ups throughout the process.

The owner is invited to all of these but never comes and never comments on work in progress.

And yet it always goes exactly the same way as it did last fall.

The owner had been overseas at a conference-slash-vacation that lasted up until the week we planned to go to press with the brochure.

He gets back, checks on my (totally complete) brochure, and tells me he “doesn’t like the feel of it–can you design it without so many harsh rectangles?” He also wanted me to switch the orientation of the pages from vertical to horizontal because he saw one “very professional” catalog done that way at the conference.

I worked overtime (without getting paid extra) for two weeks to make it happen, we got to press ten days late, and we showed up in people’s mailboxes at least 2-3 weeks behind all our competitors, because the printers had other jobs once we missed our deadline.

And the owner blamed me for “poor planning.”

–Kathryn C., Home Goods Retail Brand

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FMThieving Coworkers

I know I’m not the only one who deals with office assholes stealing their food. Usually, though, it’s limited to the kinds of items you wouldn’t immediately miss–a little bit of the salad dressing you left in the fridge with a massive label on it, or a shmear of the cream cheese you keep on hand.

I like to lessen the pain of starting my work day by eating breakfast at my desk in the morning. My hour commute means that once I’m there, I’m pretty starving. I always keep bagels in the freezer so I can toast one up before I open my inbox.

One day, I come in and check the freezer for my customary bagel and…nothing. They’re all gone. I eat one every day, so I knew one was left, but here I was, starving, and there was nothing in the freezer but a lean cuisine lasagna.

I swear out loud and another coworker in the break room asks what’s going on. I tell him that “some asshole stole my bagels, so now I have literally nothing to eat.” (I may have been hangry.)

He smiles blandly and says “oh, that was me. I left my breakfast at home by accident. I’ll replace it tomorrow, though.”

What the FUCK?!?

The worst part of it? We work literally next door to a cafe. Yes, they serve bagels.

–M.P., Insurance Industry