At the tail end of a massive maintenance shutdown (16 hr days for everyone, for 2 weeks) the mill leadership started a site-wide meeting with pictures and stories of their recent trip to Japan. How they went golfing, the great meals they had, their trip to the mountain, etc. They finally wrapped that up and proceeded to tell us that cost of living raises were going to be small that year due to them being “unsure about next year’s profit margins”.
There was a pretty steady wave of resignation letters for the 6 months following that meeting.
tons of upvotes and comments for this one. definitely a frequent flop by management.
It’s amazing how often I see executives talking about their cool trip, their new plane, or other rich person bullshit during the same presentation where they are telling their employees to suck up some furlough, reneg on bonus, or similar financial hardship.
Jesus, some people just have no awareness whatsoever.
It’s almost always better for a company to have resignations than layoffs.
So it’s kind of always been a thing for them to “encourage” resignations with shit like this, then hire back new people later for drastically lower salaries.
It’s what a lot of places are doing now mandating return to the office.
That sounds good in theory but with layoffs you tend to at least aim to let the worst employees go. With resignations you have literally the opposite. The best people are the ones that will go and the best ones will go first as they can and will find a new job more easily.
Not saying that they don’t do it for that reason but sometimes (and I’d say most times) people are just incompetent and do stupid shit like this.
Similar thing happened at my first job out of college. It was a year into COVID and we’d been WFH since the spring before this annual June meeting. They had just gotten done announcing that our productivity had exceeded targets, when they added two more announcements:
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WFH was ending, and we’d all have to go back to an office that didn’t have enough desks for everyone to be there all at once but that was okay because we could all just coordinate amongst ourselves as to who gets to sit where and when and when we had in person all-hands meetings some people could just sit on the floor and work.
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Due to a lawsuit filed against an entirely different OU we shouldn’t expect much in the way of bonuses this year.
We saw the stress the company was under between the lawsuit and the move, so over the next couple months we helped by cutting about a million dollars a year from their annual salary budget.
some people could just sit on the floor and work.
i hope you have a workplace safety agency where you are, because damn…
Where I was. I noped tf out of there, and a few weeks after they started enforcing RTO America set it’s records for daily new COVID cases and daily deaths. We really did do COVID the way we did Vietnam: it got too expensive so we gave up, declared victory and threw a bunch of people away.
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I thought I made people mad by ordering a curry chicken sandwich in a student-ran shop in college, but I hadn’t paid attention to an announcement that was made at the end of the class and I accidentally interrupted the minute of silence for a terrorist attack that had happened a few days before
I remember a pause for a minute’s silence announced in the upper concourse of a train station (UK) last year. It was disconcertingly comedic as the people walking in either on the phone or with a friend were very confused at why everyone inside was standing motionless and glaring at them.
I think I was working in that station on that day, because I have a very similar anecdote. Actually someone came to buy a ticket, and was annoyed because they thought they might miss their train having to wait for the minute’s silence to end. Not even the most callous passenger I’ve come across either.
Where did you see that? I’m in the UK, can’t remember exactly which station but pretty sure it was a London station with underground
Honestly fuck those intercom announcements. If you want to have a minute of silence, say “we will now have a minute of silence” instead of “mrrrr mrr mrrr mr drrrrr mrrrrr mrrrrr-mrrrrrrrr” fucking shit quality can’t understand a word they say
It was an announcement in class by the teachers
Ah well then you’re just a dummy.
We had a big mandatory meeting where an executive came in to tell us all to be happy we weren’t getting our bonuses or pay raises, and used a weird analogy about poor people being perfectly happy, because they have realistic expectations and that’s all you need to be happy.
He then had to leave early, as he quipped he was sharing a ride with a fellow executive on the private jet, and if he didn’t leave right then, he’d have to suffer flying commercial.
If you’re still there, organise your workplace. Unionise. Join the IWW - they can help you to accomplish this.
This was like a decade ago, I’m elsewhere now. Still not union, but I personally have no room to complain (reasonable hours and conditions and quite well paid).
went to an international boarding school that had a very diverse spectrum of political beliefs
I was in the school’s pride club, and my senior year this very charismatic kid, Ken, joined. Ken was an international student
we start our first meeting, and Ken is a vibrant member of the group. but he’s saying some very… odd things. he’s talking about how gay people are mentally ill and need to be helped, lotsa fun stuff
the club leader very patiently pushes back on him on this, and eventually asks “well it’s not like any gay people are here now, right?”
… he didn’t come back after that meeting
For months at one place I worked senior developers and even junior managers had been haranguing the higher-ups with an alarm bell on how important the Internet was going to be and how we needed to start pivoting toward outfitting our product with the ability to interact properly on the Internet. We were steadfastly ignored and our concerns were quietly scoffed at because our product was a “best of breed” product in our space.
Then we got hit by a huge wave of lost sales because we had no viable scheme in place to proper interact with Internet-based applications.
The then-CEO called a “developers all-hands” meeting in which he pranced around on the stage at the front of the auditorium to complain to us that nobody had been telling him how important this Internet thing was going to be and that we were supposed to be keeping an eye on the leading edge of technology so he can make plans for these things.
This sparked a VERY LOUD outcry as about 150 software developers who’d been ignored and scoffed at for months just flipped a switch into revolution mode. Lots of people started talking loudly (then shouting). One guy with a laptop connected it to the big projector display and started scrolling through an email folder where he’d collected the notices warning about the importance of the Internet and management’s (including the CEO’s) condescending replies. By the end of that little skirmish the CEO was making a lame excuse that he was “joking” and was “taking our feedback very seriously” after 20 people (half of them very senior) just flatly quit in front of him and walked out of the auditorium.
That’s probably the worst “read the fucking room, dude!” moment I ever saw.
My first job out of university.
Company is going through financial hardship. Boss cancels our collective insurance without telling us. Then the president of the company does a meeting in a shady motel reception room to announce to everyone the company isn’t going well and we all need to take a 10% pay cut. Ends the PowerPoint presentation with a photo from our major client’s ads with a lady on a beach with a laptop. President says “oh that’s going to be me in a few weeks. I’ll be going to Greece!”
The whole room just say there silent.
Not a specifically bad instance, but everywhere I’ve worked has always had that guy who has a hundred irrelevant questions at the end of a meeting, holding up 10 or so people from actually getting on with work.
If 1 person has a question, then chances are good most people have that same question but are too afraid to ask it in front of everyone.
“Don’t you guys have phones?”
Biggest physical room I’ve witnessed a misread happen in
“Is this some out of season April fools joke?”
And yet after everything that happened with Diablo Immortal, Diablo 4 was apparently Blizzard’s best selling game ever.
If the customers don’t care why should the company?
I worked a night shift at a lobby of some residential building, with another guy patrolling the building.
Some mentally unstable person wound up sitting at the lobby while the guy was on patrol (long story), so I sent him a message explaining the situation as I didn’t want to talk about it in front of the person.
The patrol guy comes back, looks at the person, looks at me and says “so, who’s the psycho?”
Good lord, what an inconsiderate asshole
“Don’t you all have phones!?”
Thing is, the guy wasn’t wrong. Everyone in that room most certainly had a phone capable of playing the game.
But Blizzard was teasing Diablo 4 all but without actually saying it. I feel that a simple black screen, a voice over, and a flaming “IV” would have been all that was needed since they obviously was balls deep in development of it at the time.
And Blizzcon is a PC gaming centric event and we all know how PC gamers feel about mobile games. He didn’t just read the room wrong, he was in the wrong room entirely. The mobile game should have been announced as a Twitter post
In comparison Bethesda was smart about announcing Fallout Shelter by talking about Fallout 4 first, then going “oh btw some of us been doing this phone game on the side…”
I was an interpreter for this event, and I was the one covering this part of the panel. As an ex-Blizz fan, this moment is seared in my memory for many reasons. The shame of having to interpret this not the least.
?
Yup, I was there as well. The bride moment of dead silence followed by booing after they announced it will forever be etched into my brain. To be fair though, poor Wyatt was set up and was never going to land that pitch in that setting.
CEO decided to lay off a huge portion of the company. Then he had the nerve to have an all-hands saying that the company’s financials were great and that they were on track to make $X billion in revenue in some years. Most off the laid off people were still in the fucking call.
My employer told us all the rumours were true. Layoffs were happening. They called it “difficult conversations” instead of firings.
About 1/5th of a team of 1000 people.
Apparently they hadn’t decided who yet.
Meanwhile we just received the biggest bonus in the companies history due to historic profits.
Then the CEO told investors that they expect a big pickup early next year and will need to hire a bunch of people to handle the demand.
So they are firing a bunch of people for 6 months to hit financial targets in the back half of the year before hiring people again.
Everyone that is to be fired is still waiting to find out who will be axed.
Me. 19. In Ireland for a 2 hour layover to move onto Germany. I realize I can drink here. I go to the bar in the airport.
“What can I get you?”
“Can I get an Irish Car Bomb?”
Yeah… they didn’t like that. I didn’t know anything about the terrorism shit! 😩
I heard this years later by my former boss. He used to work for a company that just announced some lay-offs because work was slow. Right as the lay-offs were being announced the head of the company pulled into the lot with his new Porsche lease. It was terrible timing, but the corporate lease was up and the car was ordered months prior. Just made the owner look especially tone-deaf since the car came the same say as the lay-off announcement.
that reminds me of a meeting I was in with the CEO of the company I worked for and we went around the room sharing our hobbies. Everyone said things like reading books or baking or playing video games or whatever.
The CEO said collecting vintage cars.
The CEO said collecting vintage cars.
I know people aren’t going to believe this, but honestly, you don’t need to be a bazillionaire to collect vintage cars. It sure helps (a lot!!), but depending upon what he was collecting, you can buy certain classics for (relatively speaking) cheap.
The director at my old company was into classic cars too and we would shoot-the-shit all the time about his cars and mine.
My whole family was into vintage British roadsters. If you’re willing to work a bit and to flip them after you’ve had your fun, all but the first one pay for themselves.
But it’s hard to say goodbye!
I always thought of it like sending my kid to college. Doubly so because the money I got from selling my '72 MGB sent me to college.
I always think of it like Pokemon. I want to collect them all.
Why are most of the stories here about dickhead executives
Went to a cousin’s wedding, her parents split when she was little so I’d not seen my Uncle Mal for decades. Tbh everyone was expecting him not to show because he’s a selfish twat and knows nobody likes him.
Surprise, Mal is here. He had an inexplicably-attractive, younger date (Mal was a disgusting, horrid-breathed, lumpy old man and his date was a pretty, well-spoken woman in her 30s so we all assumed she was an escort, as Mal has no redeeming qualities).
The whole time everyone is desperately avoiding being stuck alone with him, and everyone is talking about having the same conversation… Mal has written a book, he’s a writer now, and he’s written a poem he wants to read.
He was given many hints, subtle and not-so-subtle that his poem wasn’t wanted and he agreed not to read it. Unfortunately whether due to ego or wine, he loudly interrupted someone elses toast to announce he had a poem to read. Our collective hearts sank.
It was worse than we expected, at one point including cringe-inducing references to his daughter having large breasts. It went on and on for at least 5 minutes of everyone silently looking at the floor, sneaking the occasional “No way he just said that?!” glances at each other. He eventually finished, and just stood there awkwardly for about 10 secs, I assume waiting for applause, which obviously was not forthcoming.
Read the fucking room Mal, no-one wants to hear your shitty poem and no-one cares that you’re (allegedly) a published writer now. And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
That sounds horrible but in good news this was probably the funniest story I’ve heard on Lemmy so far
The last sentence I will admit is a shameless ripoff of a line from It’s Always Sunny, rest is my writing so I’m glad you enjoyed it. At least some good came from suffering his presence!
I swear this feels like a plot point from a Righteous Gemstones episode. Sounds like you have a real life Uncle Baby Billy
I’ve been meaning to watch this show but I was put off by the evangelical-ness of it… worth watching then? This happened in the UK about 8 yrs ago!
I was the same way. Especially as someone who lives in Texas and is surrounded by those types. Not to give anything away but it is closer to mobster than evangelicals.
Had a teacher tell some students that it’s rude to speak a foreign language in school (an international school)
