"I refuse to let them treat me like an outsider without proper cause, so I'm giving them proper cause..."

"My coworkers used everything I said against me, so I withdrew socially; unless it is work-related, I do not speak to them (outside of good morning and goodbye).

They don't like that. So they went to management to complain that I stopped speaking to the team under the guise of 'we are worried about her.'

I told my manager that I don't believe they are worried about me, and neither should she. I then reminded her that there is no workplace policy or stipulation in my union's collective agreement that I must be social with them and that I was continuing not to be.

I refuse to allow them to treat me like an outsider without proper cause...so I am giving them proper cause."

"I told my bosses I didn't feel it was fair to essentially punish me for being too good at my job.

"Also, 'Imaginary Safety Net': Telling employees, 'We're always here to help, don't hesitate to ask,' then proceeding to bite your head off or be impatient or unavailable if you actually ask for help."

"I dealt with this when cross-training into another team, but they always said to my boss, 'we are here for her, she just needs to speak up more, or 'she's underperforming, and we can assist if she speaks up.'

They most certainly were not; all they did was ignore me.

I was the only person on their team with a 100% quality rate. I didn't work as fast as they did because completing all the steps, even as fast as the programs allowed, took longer than their apparent average completion time, which explains why no one else had a 100% quality rate. 

Mind you, this is an industry where so much as a 1% drop in quality rate causes twice the work and screws over the client."

"Several years back, I had a job where I was responsible for all of the company’s written communication. The business was poorly run, and they kept inventing ways to make things unnecessarily difficult, particularly by sending too many marketing emails.

At one point, they decided to send even more, so they asked the sales guys to write their own emails as well. None of them wanted to do it because they couldn’t see a financial incentive (they made commission on a high-end luxury product by dealing with their customers directly), so they all decided to weaponize their incompetence by writing horrendous emails. It took me longer to fix their writing than it did to write emails from scratch, which was infuriating.

Eventually, I noticed the worst a-hole occasionally had a weirdly well-written sentence amidst an otherwise barely intelligible paragraph. So I copied and pasted the sentences into Google and realized he was plagiarizing professional reviews. I reported it to my manager multiple times, and he was given a series of warnings.

It was so satisfying one day when I realized an email he had written sounded familiar, and I looked in my archives and realized he was plagiarizing me! He had copied one of my past emails and didn’t even attempt to hide it. I reported it immediately, and he was fired that day. How did he think I wouldn’t recognize my own writing?"

"It often manifests as phrases such as 'just stay positive' or 'everything happens for a reason,' creating a culture of distrust, burnout, and low morale.

It literally is the most disturbing thing in my field. I hate it so much. It’s so bad for our mental health and a trap. I refuse to participate in it."

"Then they wonder why the company is always out of money."

"A single point of failure! We had an older gentleman who had been in the company for over 40 years and did all the weird stuff no one else knew how to do, yet it wasn't documented anywhere. All the managers he had knew it was a problem, but would wash their hands of him. Plenty of people left his team because he wouldn't share that knowledge.

Last year, he decided to retire, exactly when a massive system upgrade project was coming to a head. He had told everyone he would retire as soon as the project went live, so I give him credit for the heads-up, but management did nothing. He hung on for an extra year, waiting for a handover set up, but nothing happened, so he gave his notice and left two months before the new system launched.

There has never been chaos like we experienced. We're nearly six months post-update and still find things he used to do. The company has no idea how he did it in the old system, and they have to work out how it fits into the new system.

I'm, thankfully, mostly shielded from the fallout. I do my bit and feed the data into the new team, and watch the fallout, whilst aware that I've also become a single point of failure myself. I'd make the effort to document my role in line with the new system processes, but given the chaos of the new system, I have too much on my plate and don't have the time.

I'm just hoping to win the lottery, not to buy a flashy car or a big house, but to hand in my notice — it's the only thought that keeps me going."

"I asked my friend, who’s a manager, why the employees at her store had to baby the younger girl? She said, 'Because I want it done that way.' I hope she’ll rethink it because that’s how burnout and resentment start."

"It's very hard to combat, as you look like an unreasonable, unstable shrew if you object to it."

"Bonus points if they harbor a weird jealousy toward you and try to trash your work reputation as part of their angling.

They tend to have a frenetic work style that is difficult to track; they’re attempting to make it look like they’re covering a lot of ground (for that promotion), but they’re really playing whack-a-mole, and someone’s gotta deal with the flying debris (often you).

Much of their clearly toxic behavior is excused under the guise of a woman trying to ladder up in a man’s world, at its core, though, it’s usually a personality disorder mixed with some good old-fashioned bullying."

"I have a boss who spends the majority of our 1:1s digging for dirt on my coworkers. After being the recipient of his using this exact tactic on me, I see exactly what he’s doing, and it’s gross.

I won’t play. It’s hard, but try not to say anything about coworkers in this situation that you wouldn’t if they weren’t sitting on the call, too. I promise it’s a trap."

"At this point, I'm like, 'If you're gonna talk to me like that, I will do everything to not seek help or coaching from you. You don't even know how to talk to people. Next.'"

"The other store locations are not being lazy — they’re just not pushing their employees beyond their expected limits and job descriptions, and they actually seem to be a lot nicer to their employees.

Also, weaponized incompetence from the morning shift, who didn’t care that they were causing a ton of work for the night crew."

"I once was working for an attorney and was told to keep a client informed of the extra time needed to complete their request, which I did. A few days later, a separate email from a managing partner, only sent to the attorney I was working for, stated, 'We are no longer going to send the files to (particular client).' Never mind that I spent two months compiling and reviewing everything for this case. 

Then the attorney flew off the handle at me when the client followed up on those files, so she sent the client an email claiming that I made a mistake when I informed them of the timeline.

I kept a record of all her BS so HR has a compilation of her toxicity."

"I had a boss give two coworkers and me a project with very, very loose guidelines on what was wanted, but it was to create full training materials for new starters. So we did. 

At 4 p.m. the day before the starters began, she said she didn’t like what I’d made because 'it won’t print well (even though I’d made sure it would),' and made me redo it with one hour left in the work day."

Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.