Ask Lemmy

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.

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

Former CEO gathers 20-30 of us in the board room, talks about the difficult economy, proceeds to fire everyone.

The silence was deafening.

The meeting ends, he stands at the door expecting us to shake his hand as we leave.

Not a single person shook his hand.

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.

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.

I worked at Cabela's when it was bought out by Bass Pro. The sale went into effect mid-September, and in October they announced that all Cabela's locations would be open on Thanksgiving for the first time ever and that ALL employees were required to be at work

On Thanksgiving day, when the employees who had their family time stripped away last minute were on the edge of revolt, the billionaire owner of Bass Pro made us print out and distribute an email he sent to all managers.

It was pictures of him and his family enjoying their Thanksgiving at his estate and a letter from him expressing how important it was to share the day with family and friends.

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.

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.

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?”

Had a teacher tell some students that it's rude to speak a foreign language in school (an international school)

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! 😩

One time the company big boss did a speech telling us how we could all learn a thing or two from his protégé, and clapped him on the shoulder.

If big boss had spent more time in the office, he'd have known that Mr Protégé spent most of his working hours playing ping-pong with Big Boss's trophy-wife.

As an autistic person with ADHD I am going to leave this one alone. 😬

"Don't you guys have phones?"

Biggest physical room I've witnessed a misread happen in

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

In my old job, we were invited to an ultra-important Zoom call that was mandatory for everybody based in head office to attend. The meeting was scheduled at 9:30AM on a Monday morning, in the midst of our busiest week of the month when we had time-critical payment runs to get out for approval by 12PM. Hundreds were pulled from their work.

What was this ultra-important Zoom meeting about?

Our chief financial officer was announcing his resignation. I think everybody on that call would have rather gone back to their work than hear him brag about his plans to comfortably retire and "never work a day beyond 55" for twenty minutes. It was the most tone-deaf and patronizing announcement I've ever heard, especially in a workplace largely staffed by people who were struggling to even make ends meet.

Even my (then) line manager was like "Was that it?"

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.

I'm a physical therapist. I started as a physical therapist assistant. Way back in PTA school, our instructors brought in three people with spinal cord injuries for us to learn from. They talked about their experiences, showed us how they transfer, and one showed us his modified pickup truck that had hand controls and a crane to put his wheelchair in the back.

One of our classmates named Nancy had a habit of putting her foot in her mouth. She had absolutely zero filter. Our class guests were taking questions and one person asked about dating, in a respectful manner. Hearing about challenges related to normal stuff like that helps us to answer questions if we have a patient with a new spinal cord injury. One of the people said they had been with their gf for a few months and was talking about how they chose date activities and stuff. Pretty innocuous, nothing super personal.

Nancy makes a joke along the lines of "I'm surprised anyone would want to date someone like you," kind of chuckling as she said it. The guest speakers seemed to take it in stride but man everyone in the class was looking around clearly horrified.