He Thought He “Outsmarted The System”
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“I found out that my boss was having hourly employees clock out after 40 hours, then clock back in under a different LLC that was a ‘staffing agency’ so that it was technically two different jobs and he didn’t have to pay extra for overtime.
He believed he was the smartest man on the planet and thought he’d outsmarted the system, but he was far from the first person to think of this. Also, it’s super illegal.
I told one of the hourly guys this when he was talking to me about his money problems. I got fired, but apparently, all the hourly guys were given a check for their unpaid overtime and had to go to a law office to sign an affidavit that they’d been paid properly.”
This Manager Had One Creative Way Of Eliminating Cost
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“I used to work at Arby’s. The general manager there had an unwritten policy: every fourth or fifth order that went out the drive-thru must have a ‘forgotten’ item, and no receipts were to be put in those bags. That way people couldn’t prove something they ordered was missing.
His reason behind this was that it saved a few hundred dollars a month in food costs, and that money went straight into his pockets.
To fight this, I randomly added free items to orders to balance it out. Forget that guy and his food costs.”
Where Was The Money Going?
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“I work in nonprofits. I once had a boss who blatantly lied to a donor about where their money (a large amount of money, in the tens of thousands) would go. She justified it, like everyone in nonprofits, by saying it was going to do good, which was kind of true. But that doesn’t justify fraud.
I had witnessed her do similar things before. I anonymously sent an email to a board member I trusted to give more oversight over our fundraising, but nothing really changed. My boss was good at sweet talking and gave a good impression, but did lots of unethical stuff with fundraising, stuff that would have made my professors in school cry. I quit a few months later.
Right after college, I was a paramedic, and I saw a TON of unethical stuff, especially in privatized nursing homes. Nurses/aides refusing pain medications to keep residents behaving the way they want, locking residents in their room when they became annoying, and several times, severe cases of medical neglect because the patient was ‘gross.’
My partner and I called adult protective services several times, which slightly ticked my bosses off because they wanted to keep contracts, but they couldn’t do anything about it since I was a mandated abuse reporter and it would be illegal for me not to call.”
They Weren’t TECHNICALLY Breaking The Law
“Many years ago, I used to work for a company, which did business with the German government. The company was based in Germany, but it outsourced the work to my country. However, due to the nature of the business, we handled ‘sensitive data,’ and the company didn’t want the client to know that they’d basically handed it out to a bunch of foreigners, who may as well be spies for all they know. So they tried very hard to make it appear as though we’re all living and working in Germany.
Our email signatures had the name of the German branch of the company rather than the one in our country.
Our phone number was actually the number to the German office, re-routed to the one in our country. If anyone called us, they’d have an impression that they’re calling the office in Germany.
Our printers were mapped to the ones in the office in Germany. Which means that all of the traditional mail correspondence (of which there was a lot) was printed out in Germany and sent to the client from there.
Although my direct manager was in my country, I was instructed to direct my clients to the managers in Germany.
All of the training, photo shoots, and especially the meetings with clients, were held in the office in Germany, together with the German staff, giving the impression that this was our workplace.
As for what did I do about it… nothing, actually. I found it all quite funny. They weren’t technically breaking the law.”
It Looked Bad If “Certain People” Didn’t Pass
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“I was a grad student TA in engineering and was helping the professor go over the final marks after the exam. We were going through the grades to make sure things were graded consistently and with a reasonable bell curve. If we found a student who failed with about 49% or 48%, we would go through the exam/mid-term/labs to see if we couldn’t be generous and give them that one extra mark here or there to let them pass.
That was the practice until we got to two girls in the class who were at 40% and 38% respectively and the professor bumped them up to a pass. I looked at him and said, ‘Really?’ He was this old gruff tenured professor who usually had no time for nonsense, so I was a bit taken aback. He leaned back in his chair, and told me something I never thought I would hear come from him.”