Casual Conversation

I’ve probably told this story a million times now.

Had a boss that was clearly an entitled, arrogant, hand-fed asshole his entire life. He used to pull all kinds of illegal shit at his company. I’ll bullet this to save time:

• Asked me one time if I wanted to do some web dev work for the company website. He wouldn’t tell me what he was willing to pay or anything and said I had to accept first. I refused because he wouldn’t tell me. The kicker: his web dev team was waiting in the lobby to meet with him. He was trying to undercut them by underpaying me to do their work.
• He was paying a woman under the table illegally as a favor to a friend. Pretty sure she was in the country without a visa. I didn’t give a shit about that (fuck ICE) and never said anything. What pissed me off was that he was clearly exploiting her and not paying her well.
• He regularly tried to force people into signing pieces of paper that would outline an error made, and would try to garner the wages of employees to cover it. This is highly illegal but some people signed and in one instance, a woman had $800 taken from her pay over a few weeks. They tried to pull this on a colleague and I for a job we had never even heard of. It was obvious he thought we could be scared into signing. Get fucked, pal.
• He tried to make me do work off the clock once and I was essentially fired until it was done. For context we installed and designed vehicle wraps. I was a designer that ran a 54” printer. We had a ton of client jobs come in so I was pretty busy. He calls over to the office I’m in (we had 2 locations) and tells me he needs some stickers for his own vehicle pretty quickly. I tell him we’re pretty busy but I’ll fit them in. Fast forward a few days or so. His stickers aren’t done because I’m swamped and customer work comes first. He tells me (through my manager) that I have to print, drive to the other office (1 hour round trip with a paid toll), and install the decals off the clock because I’m essentially fired until it’s done or I’m fired fired. This was the last straw for me. I tell my manager verbatim “I’m not fucking doing that,” clock out and go home—never to return.
• Fast forward a few weeks. I get a notice that the company has reported me for getting unemployment benefits without being fired. So a phone mediation session gets scheduled between myself, the dickhead, and an unemployment office person. The owner lies the entire time saying that they called me multiple times and I refused to answer. I call bullshit and ask if they’d like me to obtain phone records. Silence. Of course because employees have zero fucking power in the US, I’m told I have to pay back the unemployment and they rule in the company’s favor. I tell them “I’m not paying back a single penny of this” and hang up on everyone. Every time the mail came stating what I had to pay, I tore it up and threw it away. No one ever came after me.
• It gets worse. I hear from a woman that works there that she won a court case against him. Apparently he called her late at night, super drunk, and verbally harassed her with sexual comments. He had a wife and kid at the time (I say that because I’m pretty sure his wife divorced him over this). He also had to take a massive hit to pay out the settlement. Fucking piece of shit human finally getting what they deserve.

All the people who "accidentally" said things like "they (Chinese) just don't value life like we do" within earshot of me kind of merge together in my memory as one enormous workplace bully.

The ones who would then pretend to spot me and wide-eyed add, "Oh, not you Dianne. You're one of the good ones" form the second enormous workplace bully.

There's a reason I moved here "for a year or two" … almost 25 years ago.

There was this woman that worked in my department named Rachel who was the absolute worst. She was condescending, rude and just overall bad at her job. I actually had worked with her previously and she was just as bad at the previous job too. When she put in her notice a few of us actually threw a party in the break room.

The CEO

Had one boss who disclosed a new employee's diagnosis to the rest of the team in order to discredit that employee's ability to do their job. Among many many other things. The tipping point for me was her sending out an email (after the employee had already moved on to another department) which was just titled "EVIDENCE OF BAD [WORK]" trying list a bunch of shit that in her eyes had been done badly. This would be whatever if she was emailing it to her own boss or whatever - no, she cc'd the ENTIRE team and it was very clearly done to try to embarrass the employee, who as I mentioned had already left and couldn't even defend themselves against the bullshit this person was saying.

Also worked at another place where the bullies (who were mental health specialists) bullied a 60-year-old team member so hard that she went home crying. They'd also regularly make 'team plans' in office and have 'team lunches' where they'd very purposefully exclude one or two people but then very loudly chat and comment about all of it in front of those people. Place was toxic as fuck.

Fucking Kevin. Told me to my face that he hated me. Of course he was "just kidding."

Met a few power tripping, bullying assholes in my 20 years in casinos. Mostly the dealers are alright, the waitresses are nice enough but seem to host their own private dramas in the kitchen, cashiers and receptionists are fine. Even the customers are decent enough people 99% of the time. Management though. I feel like spitting when I think of some of the things I have witnessed.

First and foremost, most of them need a massive amount of cognitive dissonance to function, gas lighting is a close second trait. It’s fair to say that there are a few that are ok but they are quite rare. Whereas 99% of customers are nice people, it seems to be 1% of managers are decent people in my experience. They get into a comfortable position and look down at others from their high horse, usually because it’s what happened to them in the past so now it’s “their turn”.

There are two main bullies in my current workplace. One gets angry every time a dealer pays out an amount over £500, he will kick chipping machines, break pens and walk off to smoke a cigarette outside, he will remove dealers from tables if they are paying out too often, he stares at games angrily when someone is winning as well, he trash talks staff when they aren’t around and is just generally unpleasant to work with. The other one acts like he’s the saviour of the whole casino, he makes out like he does everything selflessly, he will go and take over from inspecting tables with a cup of tea in his hand, acting casual like it’s no big deal whatever is happening. At the same time he practically does nothing but drink tea and brag about all the things he does. During my shift I sometimes check the cctv for fun to see what exactly they did and it’s usually not a lot but then when you ask them about it, “Oh god I didn’t stop but you know we can handle things like that”. He’s a one upper as well, if you did something, he’s done it but always way more. Dealt a busy game? ”nah, you don’t know what busy is, when I dealt, the table looked like New York City with all the chips piled so high”. He’s another short angry man though.

Then you get the wannabe managers, some that already read the mantra “fake it til you make it” and do just that. Either through nepotism or favouritism they get what they desire most in the workplace and make other people’s lives hell. One in particular is another short angry man, he treats people like shit and likes to act like he’s the owner. Each time he would try to focus on me I would just look over his head and say “I can’t see who’s talking” he would turn bright red, just like his tie and walk off. He stands watching dealers with his arms crossed and nodding like he’s some kind of Caesar acknowledging your right to breathe.

I’m at the position in my career where I have no desire to progress further in terms of promotions, because fuck it, it’s just a job, but I’m knowledgable enough to know more than most of the management and the wannabes there, so I have some leeway with what I can get away with. I fix a lot of things and am generally well liked by the actual owner. This often leads to situations like the above where someone will be feeling bad about themselves and try to take it out on me but I can be quite harsh with my responses when provoked. I’m not really afraid to point out the truth in those kind of situations.

So yes, I had a bit of a rant but those are the kinds of people you can expect to work with in casinos. Go and travel the world to work in another one and it’s still the same.

I was intern at a discount store and we had one manager and she was so far the worst.

She started out all cool and chill. However when there were stressful moments, she would blame anyone else but herself.

I remember, she told a colleague to put all the materials “on the left side”, I saw the colleague being really busy with multiple costumers. So I told the colleague, I would do it for her. So I did and then the manager starts to yell, that she didn’t want it at the left side and wanted to speak to the one who did it.

I just said, I did and took the blame. Colleague kept thanking me. But these situations were basically an everyday thing. She bullied people this way into quitting, even if this wasn’t her intention.

Glad I left after my internship ended there.

Giordan Benavides.

Fuck you, you lying, scheming, friendless piece of shit

A fucking real estate agent

By far

Too many to count. I used to do office work and there was a pair of women who were just fucking nasty, would mimic how people spoke, openly blank people and give people catty looks up and downs. They only did it to women. Loads of people complained but the company didn't care.

I worked with someone who mercilessly victimised an innocent guy who was autistic to the point where the poor bastard was talking about killing himself

Management knew. There were no consequences.

There are few people who I genuinely hate, but he's one of them.

What constitutes a workplace bully?