Yahoo Lifestyle 19 Stories About When People Learned That HR Is Not Their Friend That Left Me Speechless
Recently, I wrote an article about the times people found out the hard way that HR/the workplace was not their friend, and in the comments, BuzzFeed Community members sounded off with some stories of their own. I figured it wouldn't hurt to share a few more, so here are some of the most interesting:
1."I told my boss that if he expected me to be on call 24/7, he needed to start paying me a salary instead of hourly. He said no."
"I contacted HR, and they said I'm right, my boss should be the one on call, and for me to stop taking after-hours calls immediately. My boss later told me to ignore HR because they didn't know what they were talking about, and I did in fact have to be on call 24/7 instead of him.
I reported him to HR again, and was told to just do what he said. He was also reported to HR by other employees for saying a number of inappropriate things to me. I only know about this because he told me."
2."At a former workplace, our head of HR was very manipulative. She was super bubbly and friendly, but made sure to throw you under the bus when it mattered."
"Anyhow, she would always chat with my friend and I in the morning and knew everything that was going on in my life. After working there for several years I started having heart problems resulting in a need to wear a monitor for a whole month, and my partner several weeks later was hit by a car and needed two surgeries. So for months, I was missing work for my own appointments... and also my partner's appointments, since he could not drive."
"My manager was fairly new in her position and let me know that our HR manager had sent out an email saying I’d lose my health insurance due to so much lost time, even though I was still working full-time hours."
"She knew why I was missing time, and instead of setting me up with FMLA, she threatened the insurance and my paycheck that I desperately needed at the time since my partner couldn’t work.
I ended up quitting after having a big meeting with her where I called her out for being shady and committing multiple labor violations during my time there. She told me I was wrong and eventually tried to blame my manager instead, who was nothing but kind to me. She’s still going strong at the company, and I know many good employees who quit because of her."
3."I went through this with an old boss who was sexually harassing me. He was the CFO of a large ad agency. I was the only female in his corporate entourage except for his admin."
NBC / Via giphy.com
"He never made a physical move, and all his verbal harassment was under the radar, so to speak, but he made his intentions clear. He tried so many ways to get me to ‘let my hair down’ as he so often put it.
After six months, I went to HR, and they told me I was lucky to be working with such a highly qualified man and that I must be mistaken as he may be unconventional, but he gets the job done.
We went through a merger not long after, and all of corporate was laid off. My boss got a nice big golden parachute (i.e. a lot of money to leave) while the rest of us had to finish our projects and exit.
HR is there to protect the company, not the employees."
4."I worked in a non-chain restaurant that had a drive-thru. One night, we had a car drive up, and everyone inside was wildly drunk. I did not need them or the potential mayhem they could cause on my conscience, so I called the police."
"I later found out that the driver blew over TWICE the legal limit. A couple days later, the restaurant owner scolded me and said, 'It's bad for business if our customers think we'll call the police on them.'
I promised not to do it again, but I darn sure would have without hesitation."
5."I was 16 and working as an 'administrative assistant' at the overnight camp I had attended since childhood. My boss had known me since I was 10, and I was a little shit at that age, which I don't believe she ever forgot."
"Anyhoo, my mother had been hospitalized and I was in the midst of a full-blown panic attack in the office, being comforted by my other teen friends, when my boss walked in, told me I was being 'disruptive to the other staff,' and threatened to have me escorted off camp grounds by police.
The other staff stared in disbelief. I called her a bitch (in a religious camp, mind you!) and ran back to my room. Part of me still hasn't forgiven her 12 years later."
—libm
6."Got pulled into the manager’s office and told I was being written up for watching porn on my phone."
"The union steward told me to just sign the write-up and not offer any explanation. I declined and showed them all that I still used a T9 phone."
7."I ALMOST got written up for this, but essentially pulled a righteous speech out of my butt and saved myself. I worked at a movie theater for a while that also made food. One of those places. At the end of the night, management wanted us to throw away all the food that had hit expiration and been used. No big deal, except that no employee was allowed to take anything after it was removed from inventory and before it was thrown in the trash. Kind of a stupid policy, but whatever."
"The kicker was, they wanted us to throw away all this perfectly fine food and then pour the used oil on it so that the homeless couldn’t eat out of the dumpsters. I wouldn’t do it."
"If someone is desperate enough to eat out of a dumpster, I’m not destroying possibly their only chance at food. I put the oil at the bottom and the food on top.
I didn’t get caught for months until a manager finally caught me and started to rant at me. I pulled a speech out about why it was so disgusting to pour oil on the food and blah blah blah. I made him feel bad enough that he didn’t write me up and didn’t report me. But he did tell me not to tell anyone I wasn’t destroying the food in the dumpsters.
I quit shortly after but still think that’s a horrible policy. FYI, we put the oil in these big containers with caps. We had to intentionally un-cap and pour them on the food. It made the dumpster disgusting because it was covered in a layer of oil and STANK way worse than it would. When you just put it at the bottom, that wasn’t a problem."
"Horrible disregard for human suffering aside, that sounds like a fire hazard and possible EPA violation. All in the name of something they didn’t want. WILD.In short, good for you."
8."I worked in an office where the office manager worked infrequent hours, like whatever worked best for her was good with the leadership for some reason."
"One day she sent an email to all the support staff saying that the work day began at 9 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m. If you were late, you were expected to make up that time during your lunch break, 'no excuses,' the email said."
"While this email was sent to all of the support staff, I knew it was targeted at me, as that week I had been late each morning because I had client meetings out of the office."
Pop TV / CBC Television / Via giphy.com
"I was working and my boss knew where I was, but the office manager didn’t and evidently she needed to make sure I knew she was in charge.
I simply replied to her email, 'If we were working past 5 p.m. for any reason, do we get that time back? Because last night I was here and working until 9:30 p.m. and by your logic, you owe me 4.5 hours.'
She never replied and didn’t speak to me at all for a month."
—Anonymous
9."I worked for a well-known taco franchise, and my assistant general manager took one of my coworkers home because it was cold out, we were all friends, and he didn't have a car. She came to work the next morning literally terrified to be next to him."
NBC / Via giphy.com
"We were good friends, so I pulled her aside to talk. Turns out, he tried to sexually assault her. We told HR and they blamed her, saying it was off work property and maybe she shouldn't be giving rides to people.
We both ended up quitting within a month."
—Anonymous
10."In my 20s, I worked part-time at a local large East Coast restaurant chain. I came into work one day with a package of wine coolers in a sealed bag."
"I asked the manager if I could keep them in the walk-in until the end of my shift and was told yes, as long as they stayed in the bag, unopened.
At the end of my shift, without my knowing it, two young (under 21 years of age) fellow employees had ripped open the bag and consumed a few of the wine coolers."
"They were drunk by the time I was done with my four-hour shift, and I was confronted by the manager about allowing the two younger employees access to the wine coolers, even though I was waiting on customers at the front of the store for my whole shift."
"HR contacted me two days later to inform me that I was fired. I told them that the manager had said it was okay to keep the wine coolers in the walk-in as long as they were in the bag, and I never even mentioned that I'd brought wine coolers into the store to the two 20-year-olds who got drunk.
Long story short, I was fired for the indiscretion of bringing alcohol onto company property and for getting two underage punks drunk, even though the little shits stole from me. And the manager never got reprimanded for even saying yes to my bringing the wine coolers into work in a sealed package."
—Anonymous
11."I was scolded for wrongdoing when the major jewelry retail manager I worked for was in on it."
"A customer came to pick up his order. The computer read it was paid in full and I gave him the ring.
The next day, the store manager asked where said ring was. I told her what happened and was told that the $500 ring wasn't paid for, and I 'should have asked someone about it.'
I didn't know it at the time, but I later found that she and other salespeople were manipulating the computer system so orders appeared to be paid in full, to get sales numbers and commissions posted sooner.
It also meant she was knowingly floating negative store funds and non-existent inventory. No wonder she didn't write me up for giving away jewelry!"
—Anonymous
12."When I worked for UPS I found some small toy laying on the ground of a trailer I was unloading. I took it to the security station on the way out, where everyone walks through a metal detector and gets wanded, and turned the toy into them."
"They asked for my badge when I turned it in. The next day when I went into work they had me go into the HR office and talk to them. They told me since I turned it into security and not my manager, they considered it is stealing. I could either quit for personal reasons or be fired for stealing.
When I asked the union representative there if I could do anything he just said he couldn't help me and was only there as a courtesy. WTF was I paying all those union fees for? The best part was security still had me go through the metal detector and be wanded one final time on the way out."
—Anonymous
13."I had a serious allergy attack at work. The health insurance company I worked for called an ambulance that took me to the hospital. When I returned to work, I was written up for an unplanned absence."
"I contacted HR to complain/dispute the write-up. Not only did they do nothing to help me, but they also contacted my director, who called me into the office to scream at me for having the nerve to complain."
—Anonymous
14."I've worked in construction for seven years as part of the project management (PM) staff. I had a field supervisor tell me, in front of my manager, that I'm a woman and I can't carry an extension ladder because I might trip and fall and get hurt, which would make his safety record look bad."
Pop TV / CBC Television / Via giphy.com
"Mind you, before becoming a PM, I was a commercial painter for 12 years and regularly used ladders of all sizes.
My manager blew off the comment but I took the incident to HR. After a month of no action that I could see to reprimand or correct this guy's behavior, and now he was bullying me, I told the story to my manager's manager. Still no action, but I got a call from HR asking me if I thought the man's behavior and my response was just a clash of our personalities.
Long story short, I started sending out resumes three days after the discriminatory comment. Had another job lined up within a month and gave notice. My last week there, the guy got fired because someone else had gotten seriously hurt on the job site."
—Anonymous
15."I was a new teacher at a daycare center where staff got in trouble for not ratting each other out to the director (which I didn’t know yet)."
"There was a boy in my class who had a lot of food allergies. One day, I prepared lunch for the class, triple-checking each item against his 'do not serve' list, and found everything was safe to give him.
I put his plate down in front of him but, as he reached for the food, my assistant teacher grabbed it and threw it in the trash. She thought I’d given him something he couldn’t eat, but we checked the list together and realized she was mistaken. No big deal. We gave him more and moved on with the day.
However..."
"The other teacher in the room at the time told the director a false version of the story and we were both called to her desk the next day. We explained the situation, that it was a misunderstanding and the child was safe, but she wrote us both up anyway for endangering his life."
"I told her that was ridiculous, that neither of us had done anything wrong (especially my assistant who was attempting to save his life, or so she thought) but we were dismissed.
That afternoon, I took it upon myself to apologize to the child’s mother and reassure her that he hadn’t eaten anything he was allergic to. She had no idea what I was talking about. For 24 hours, the director thought her son had eaten something dangerous and hadn’t called her.
That night, I emailed the daycare owner about the incident, and her response was to fire me 'based on what happened today.' So I was fired for NOT almost killing a child. That center closed suddenly years later...I wonder why."
—Anonymous
16."Worked as a waitress briefly. One day, the other waitress told me my tips were under the counter, so I picked them up when I was done. The next day, the boss cornered me for stealing money. I told him the other gal had put the tips there. Didn't stay long at that job."
ABC / Via giphy.com
—Anonymous
17."I was working over 80 hours a week for a few weeks because my coworkers had been fired, and I had to train the new people. HR told me I had falsified my time sheets and were instigating disciplinary procedures with a view to terminate for falsifying official records."
"It was HR who processed the earlier terminations. I just laughed, walked out and told my supervisor HR was planning to terminate me and left."
—Anonymous
18."At a major software company I once had a supervisor, let’s call her K, who insisted I run four separate teams (over half the staff on hand)."
"Halfway through the year, I told her I had some medical issues (resulting in a reasonable accommodation), that I couldn’t handle four times the workload of everyone else anymore, and that they needed to hire more managers.
Their response was to fire another one instead. She said to hang in there and do the best I could. I listed the duties I’d have to ask others to do to keep up.
Come review time, I got a negative review listing everything I didn’t do. Which was exactly the list I gave her. Verbatim. As a result, I got no bonus and no raise that year. For doing four people’s jobs. I hate her."
—Anonymous
19.And finally: "My brother’s high school ex-girlfriend became my boss. She said she would fire me. It took a year, but she did it by saying I said derogatory comments about another employee."
"When I went to HR I found out they were best friends. I was gone and am banned for life from working there.
Everyone went to HR and said she was lying. Even unemployment said this was not a reason for termination. But it was time to move on."
—Anonymous
Remember, kids: "HR isn't there to protect anyone, they're there to ensure that labor law is being followed by both the employer and the employees."
"The problem is that HR folks are also employees and can be fired by upper management, so they'll tend to lean in favor of management out of self-preservation.
I strongly believe that all HR professionals should be independent contractors bound by iron-clad contracts so they can truly be impartial...CYA by documenting everything, and any and all disciplinary action ought to be documented and signed by both parties."— Former HR manager, secretlydevito
These stories are absolutely wild, so I want to hear all your opinions down in the comments below. Feel free to share HR horror stories of your own — or, if you prefer, you can vent via this anonymous Google form! Who knows — your story could end up in an upcoming BuzzFeed article.
Please note: Some comments may have been edited for length and/or clarity.
