People Reveal When The Scales Dropped From Their Eyes And They Realized How Toxic Their Jobs Were (30 Stories)

When my 30 year old manager tried to kiss literally every girl that worked there other than 16 year old me. He just made gross comments about me almost being of age.

A male colleague was promoted above me. I was forced to attend a training he held that I had originally trained him how to do. My work wouldn’t make an exception for me, despite being the original department trainer. I was one of a couple females in my department and I never saw a promotion or raise, despite working there for five years. My male colleagues were typical stoners and got promotion/raises no problem.

When a boss told me to go to the port to bribe the officials there to release several containers of materials for the hotel we were building. I did not (and neither did that chickensh*t).

Worked in a psych hospital for a couple of years. This is a (paraphrased) conversation that one of our nurses had with the doctor about a patient that kept assaulting other patients and staff. The doctor only physically came to the facility two or three times a week. He literally did not give a sh*t.

Nurse: "Hello, doctor? The incredibly violent patient that we've all been complaining about for weeks just sent two of our staff members to the hospital. Pretty sure one of them has a broken hip. Can you please discharge this guy so we can have the police pick him up?"

Doctor: "No. Just bring in more staff. If you call me and bother me about this again I will keep him in the facility even longer. And just for this phone call I'm cancelling my rounds for the day. You can now deal with ALL of the patients getting pissed off. Good luck, don't bother me again."

Nurse: "Cool. Thanks."

We were not equipped or staffed to handle patients like this guy. He should never have been admitted to our facility. This one just one such instance of this type of situation. The doctor would frequently admit patients like this that would stretch our staff to the absolute limit. The doctor knew and understood full well the impact it would have on the staff and he just. Did. Not. Care.

When my boss started looking at the store's cameras every night to knit-pick every little detail I did so she can get mad at me for it.

One of my job's metrics for how our performance is graded by is "on time departure". We get so many points if we're within -10, -5, 0, 5 or 10 min from scheduled.

People try to cheat by tampering with the clocks and that's a punishable offense.

I was good at leaving early or on time most of the times. Got a call one day to warn me that I was under investigation because Ihad the most points in the company. They assumed that I was cheating, that's when I knew I had to go. I wasn't going to start being late to avoid repercussions

When our boss got into a screaming match with one of the managers (his daughter) in the middle of the office.

I'd just started there 3 weeks ago and it was absolutely mind boggling to watch. I looked around at my coworkers and everyone was just looking away, doing their best to stay quiet and not look at either of them. Person at the desk next to mine saw my shocked face and whispered "they do this a lot. Just ignore it."

I had a job as an industrial engineer that I really liked for 6 years. The guy who made it toxic wasn't even my boss. He was the operations manager of the building where I was domiciled, but I didn't report to him. When he started, my boss told him I was there to help him out with anything he needed. Well, a couple weeks into him working there, "what he needed" was for me to cover a Sunday shift that started at 6 AM (the reason there was a need for a Sunday shift was because he attempted to handle almost twice the amount of volume that I told him was the max for a Saturday and it went as poorly as expected), and called at midnight to let me know. When I didn't pick up because I was at my own engagement party, he went ahead and told his boss and my boss that I had agreed to come in at 6 the next morning.

It was one of the dumbest things I ever did when I actually cancelled all the plans I had with my family members who were in town and showed up. If I hadn't, there would have been about 50 employees waiting in the parking lot because nobody else had the keys, and people would have been pissed at me, but oh well. At the time, my bosses were putting me on software development projects and working on transitioning me into a software dev role, but within 6 months, I was supervising the operation from 9 AM to 9 PM M-F and 6 PM to 6 AM Saturday nights and I had been pulled from all my software projects. I quit to take a software engineering bootcamp and now I am a software engineer.

Well, I wouldn't call it toxic exactly, everyone was polite enough, but I quit a job once when it became clear to me that the task at hand couldn't be delivered on time, and my management rejected the three alternative plans I presented.

My immediate manager even told me words to the effect of "I agree that you're right, but I can't sell your plan to senior management", so I told him "then there's no point in me sticking around while this project craters", and handed him my badge.

My realization came late.

I got laid off from a job with good pay and benefits, but I was dealing with long hours, high stress, a department with low morale, and a hands-off manager who seemed to care more about the company than me.

Even though the place was toxic, I was sad to leave. I'd been there for years, and the job was in a field I know a lot about.

A few days after the layoff, I attended an event not far from the building I worked in. When I saw the building, the first thought that popped into my head was, "I'm glad I don't have to go back there tomorrow!"

Something somewhere, deep in my brain or my soul, had just told me that the job I'd just been fired from wasn't for me.