rSlash - r/Antiwork I Get Paid $80,000/year to Do Literally Nothing

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

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Welcome to our slash anti work where OP tricked his company into paying him $80,000 a year to do literally nothing. Our next reddit post is from podcast questions. I've been getting paid $80,000 a year for the last five years doing absolutely no work and I don't plan on changing a thing. I'm an account manager for a telecom company that provides VOIP phones to companies. There are about 20 of us, and our job is primarily to answer any questions about the phones, the service, billing, etc. We have hundreds of clients. What our boss does is assign clients to each of us based on a rating of how challenging and difficult they believe the end users are. Each client gets a score of 1 to 10. One means the client is basically an employee at Microsoft who is very tech savvy and we'll never have to call as asking where they

should plug in the ethernet ports. And a 10 would be like a client that's an old age home and we would get 5 calls a day from each resident asking how to get a dial tone. So one account manager may be assigned to a client who has 5,000 employees, but they're rated as a one, so it provides them just enough work for 40 hours a week. While another account manager might get a client who has only 100 employees, but they're tech idiots and they call in constantly. Well, when I started, I got assigned a client with a few 100 employees who are rated at 10.

So my company's algorithm predicted this would be just the right amount of work to keep me busy. As it turns out, this client is a highly skilled tech company that actually writes the software for the phones that we support. And their rating should have been a 1, not a 10. I get like 1-2 calls a week and literally nothing else. When it first became clear to me that they messed up the rating system, I was a good little employee and I notified my manager that they may have not allocated the proper amount of work to me. I was told that their rating system was near perfect and that I shouldn't stir the

pot. So I haven't stirred the pot for five years. My last call for support was nine days ago and I literally browse the web all day and attend the occasional meeting. I get my 5% annual raise and full benefits. I'll continue until I get caught or something better comes along. Oh, and I also work from home full time. Man, I have to imagine that just with how bloated corporate America is and just corporations

globally across all of planet earth, there's got to be like maybe one in a million jobs that are just like this, where all you have to do is show up, collect your paycheck, and then leave at the end of the day. Our next Reddit post is from Paging Dr. cucumber. I work for a small private college in admissions. I've been here for three years, and like most small businesses, I've taken on far more than what would be considered a one-person job. I've been open about my autoimmune disorder from the start and how it affects

my mobility. Long story short, my condition has worsened. I told my boss that I would be buying a wheelchair so I could come to work since she refused to allow me to work from home even though we have other workers here who are work from home full-time. After I brought my wheelchair to work, she asked me to have someone else in admissions meet with potential students because year wheelchair isn't a good look. A couple of weeks later, the heat broke on my floor. It was freezing. I emailed my boss asking her if we had any space heaters and

storage that I could use in the meantime. She didn't reply, and instead called my co-worker to ask her to come fetch a heater for me, because she can't stand seeing me wheeling around past her ivory tower. So I found a new job where I'll be making double my salary and it's fully remote. After putting in my notice, she's continued with her disparaging comments about my chair, and she told my co-workers that me quitting is probably a good thing. Because she'd probably just get knocked up again. To be clear, I had a baby in 2019. It's my only baby. I feel like I'm dying from my condition, and I financially put myself out to buy this effing chair so I could do my jobs and she's such an inflexible psycho.

I can't wait to leave. As angry as I am, I'm also just so tired and so sad. The real kicker, she's hiring two people to replace me. Because despite how messed up my body is right now, I'm still a powerhouse at this job. I've been sharing her words with every one of my co-workers and urging them to get out while they can. What I wrote here is just a tip of the iceberg. I guess I just need to rant about it, because as much as I don't care about her bottom

line, I do care about my co-workers and students, and I'm sad that it's all ending like this. Man, it's just, it's so weird to me that bosses don't want their employees to work from home. I don't get it. I have an editor and my editor works from home. He can work whatever hours he wants, any day he wants, and like, what would be the point of me forcing him to come into an office and work in an office?

That means I've got to pay for the office, I've got to pay for security and extra equipment and he's got to pay for gas so it's like lose, lose for everyone involved. So I don't understand why you wouldn't want your co-workers to work from home. It's cheaper for everyone. My last job was a technical writer and I mean it was all online, literally a hundred percent online. We would get documents, we would write other documents and then we would send out those new documents. Very, very dry boring work. And I asked my boss if we could work from home sometimes because there's literally nothing stopping us,

and he shot us down because, no, we've got to come into the office to have a team spirit and the spirit of collaboration. Keep in mind that we never actually worked with our teammates. We only only only, like I guess that's not true. We would write our documents and then we would give our documents to our coworkers who would proofread them, but like still, the way that we did that was we emailed them the documents and said, hey, can you read this?

And now with COVID, they're all working from home anyways. So all their reasons for not working from home was just complete BS. Anyways, OP, I'm glad that you moved to another job. I'm really sorry that you had to deal with this abuse. It sounds illegal to be honest. I'm pretty sure that a boss constantly criticizing an employee's wheelchair and not making accommodations for them is discrimination.

It feels like discrimination. So OP, why don't you sewer and get a second payday? Our next breaded post is from Sevathin. My boss told me that I was fired as soon as I got to work, so I laughed and walked off. I spent the next two hours shutting down my station and packing my stuff. I even destroyed my client list. Mine was the largest in the branch. When I got home about three hours later, he called me. Hey, OP, where you at? I can't find you in the office.

You fired me. Why the hell would I be at work? It's April Fools. It was a joke. Get back in here. No, you clearly said that I'm fired. I'll be taking unemployment for a few months and filing a complaint with HR. He lost his mind and I hung up on him.

It's not effing funny, so I'm taking a vacation and writing the wrongful termination train. He's called me 10 times and I think HR is trying to call me now as well. And then OP posted an update. Alright, so after some cooling off, talking with HR, some other team leads in a lawyer for several hours last night and today. It looks like my boss, Michael, is losing his position in the company and he's been put on leave. He's being replaced by somebody from the team and the other people that he ran off are coming back and getting a raise for staying. I'm being shuffled to another team, getting a $5 raise and 4 bonus weeks of vacation. The team that I'm moving to I'll be a

secondary lead on and it's a team that I've been trying to get to for three years. So I got a promotion and a race. The new boss is far less of a hassle, and she's a lot more laid back. She went to great effort to get me to join the team that she knew that I wanted and gave me a lot more than I wanted. Michael looks like he's fired from what I can tell. He has a history of issues, but he got his severance from what I heard. Man, so if I'm reading this story right, I guess this guy for April Fools came into work and fired every single one of his subordinates just as a joke.

I guess, man, that's not a joke. That's just mean. Down in the comments, we had this from Ablong and Neelis. My wife's boss tried that joke last year on a whole room full of people. Some of them started crying. It was horrible. This next post is an email that OP got from their boss, with the subject, Urgent. Hello all, happy Wednesday.

I'm not so happy this morning. Yesterday, three of you submitted your two week notice, and all three of you claimed that it was because of better opportunities. Not even thinking about the fact that some of your coworkers have lives outside of this job, and children. Are you better opportunities, which is doubtful, we pay you all fair wages, really worth affecting your team members' quality of life? I myself have children, and instead of being at their band recital this week, I'll have to be sitting at work posting job offers on Indeed Instead. This is outrageous. You all need to speak amongst yourselves and

plan these things out so you don't have to leave a company high and dry all at once. The lack of consideration for my employees is astounding. The new rule in our employee handbook will be updated to now requiring a three-month notice since that's how long it took to train you. You will give three months notice and train your replacement in the meantime, and your three months notice will serve as your consent for your base pay to be lowered by $6 an hour. Since you'll be leaving, your reduction in pay should no longer be an issue. That's how it works from now on, you can think you're in subordinates for this. You can also thank them for the extra 30 hours

of overtime per week that you'll be assigned until I find new hires who are fully trained. I expect full cooperation from this team moving forward. Have a great day. Wait, if you've got an employee who already wants to leave, why the hell would they consent to working for less for three months if they're already unhappy? This person thinks this is going to work? No, they're just going to walk out what an idiot. Our next Reddit post is from Nanaruni. My mom has worked for a small construction company for like 10 years and hasn't gotten any

raise other than the occasional large bonus. She asked and her boss said no even though he's personally filthy rich and she keeps the company afloat. She just applied to a larger construction company and with her amazing experience, even though she lacked the educational prerequisites. She blew through all three interviews, and already has a job offer within a couple of weeks of beginning her search. The new company offered her much more than she even asked for, twice her current salary, from 50k to 100k in two weeks, including great benefits. She broke the news to her old boss and he started acting so desperate, panicked, and crazy

that it emotionally disturbed her. He tried to make her a bunch of offers and promises that she knew that he wouldn't keep. He offered to pay her more than the new company offered her. He point blank told her, I haven't been paying you the value that you're worth to me. What an effing slap in the face! I am so glad that she's leaving and said no to this old boy's offer. After all these years of loyalty and struggling financially as a single mom right in front of him, he admits that he was doing it on purpose.

F. him. Small businesses don't automatically equal better businesses, folks. Man, he actually thought that would work, so essentially what he was saying was, I have been underpaying you for the past 10 years. Like, okay, if you want to keep me, then pay me the extra 50k difference for the past 10 years that I worked for you. And then, yeah, maybe I'll stay. Otherwise, I don't know, not my problem, I guess. My boss called me in for a meeting. He told me that over the past two weeks, I've spent my unpaid break staring at my phone rather than interacting with him and my colleagues. And he likes to use those breaks to explain what we have to do throughout the day. And sometimes he has to explain it twice because I didn't hear it.

He says he knows the breaks are unpaid and are our own time, but he would like me to put down my phone. I ask if there's anything wrong with my performance and he says no, but if I don't like interacting with my colleagues, then perhaps it's just not the right place for me to be. A week later, he says that he decided to let me go because I don't seem happy there. I tell him I'll just pack my things and leave. He says that I can't do that because I have a 14-day resignation period, so I have to stay there for another two weeks. I explain that I only have to stay if I want to get paid for those 14 days, and since he decided to fire me, I will not stay there. He tries to force me to stay,

but I refuse and drive home. I contact my union, and I ask him to look through my contract, all my paychecks, and my work calendars. They find out that my boss has been underpaying me and owes me close to $10,000. They also gave him a $2,000 fine. My union forces him to pay me and a few days later he calls me and says that he's extremely disappointed that I decided to end our three-year friendship like this. Bro, you've been stealing from him for three years. You think that your friends, buddy?

OP isn't your friend, he's your victim. As they say, with friends like that, who needs enemies? Honestly OP, this guy owes you money, I think he probably owes you even more money than that, because if he was trying to get you to work through your breaks, then that's paid time in my opinion. Our next reddit post is from Plaid Bear. My wife got fired, so her entire store walked. As the title implies, my wife got fired at 1pm Central Daylight Time. She was a store manager for a beauty supply chain. They claimed that she was stealing time when she corrected hers and her employees' mis-time clock punches.

You know, that totally normal thing that every US-based company in existence has practiced for the better part of 40 years? So let me give you some background on my wife. She's been a manager at this company for 3 years. In that time, she successfully taken the bottom 10 stores and made them number one. Basically, overnight, she's never gotten so much as a verbal warning, has never taken a vacation, and has run multiple stores at once as a direct manager, and has trained probably the better part of 65% of the retail employees in this region of the country.

So the company receives an anonymous tip that my wife was stealing time. In this tip, they also received a tip that the lesbian couple employed at the store was hooking up in the back room, and that the two heterosexual couples were regularly spending time off the clock in the back room. Interestingly, the only person not criticizing this report was the employee that was announced to be the new manager of the store at 1002 pm central daylight time. The district manager comes in, himming and hauling about how this isn't something that she wanted to do, and that she knows that my wife and I just had a baby. But she still unceremoniously fired my wife on the spot. By 1.15 pm, everyone aside from the new

manager had walked out. Some with choice words, some feigning two weeks notice, and with one other hearing about it through text and just abandoning her next shift. Talk about solidarity. My life is a bona fide badass. I have to wonder if people walked out because they loved working for that boss

or if they didn't want to work for the new boss or if working there was miserable and they were all just looking for an excuse or maybe all the above. That was our slash anti-work and if you like this content be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.