Halloween is scary, but bad work environments are scarier. That's why we're dedicating this week to work scaries. Read on if you dare.
We've all made mistakes, especially at work. Sometimes, those mistakes nearly destroy us, other times they just make for really good stories of utter embarrassment and humiliation, and then there are the times we make mistakes no one ever catches.
We took to the airwaves (or really to the digital waves like Instagram and our email newsletter) to ask women to share their tales of woe and horror from their own careers—or sometimes, and with permission, the careers of friends—especially those times when hiding under a rock for the next 20 years seemed like a totally reasonable response. Here's what we got.
Ink Blot Indecencies
"I was in a post-interview meeting with a VP and some other members of the team. While we were discussing the candidates, the VP’s pen exploded in his hand—which he missed entirely. Every time he touched his face during our discussion, he smeared more blue ink everywhere. For a little while, no one said anything because they didn't want to interrupt him. But once the pen was all over his face, someone finally spoke up. He never knew how long it went on."
The Eavesdropper
"I am an assistant to a TV producer, and I often have to do things like driving his kids around or delivering flowers to other people in the industry. I like my job, but lately, I’ve been aggressively saving so I can quit and pursue acting in the New Year. One day, I had some downtime, so I sent out texts to my boyfriend’s friends and family to coordinate his birthday gift. Later that day I was driving my boss’s kids home from school when my boyfriend’s sister called. I put her on speakerphone and said, “Hi! You’re on speakerphone with my boss’s kids in the backseat,” just to cover all my bases. You never know. Then, she proceeded to clearly state that she was happy to contribute a bigger chunk of money to the birthday gift because she knows I’m saving to quit my job. My stomach basically dropped out of my butt, and I spent the rest of the drive queuing up potential lies to cover my tracks in case my boss’s son ratted me out."
Never Been Caught
"I spent an entire summer doing absolutely nothing at this company where I worked as an assistant. Actually, there were two of us, and neither of us did anything. You could get your work done in under an hour, and then you'd just sit there. So we invented all these ways to fill our time without getting caught. Remember when everyone would use hot corners and widgets on their Macs? Well, my horrible boss had one look: jogging pants. We could hear him coming all the way down the hall because of the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh his pants would make. So we'd read blogs or watch Netflix all day and then the second we heard a distant whoosh, we'd all hit our hot corners so that it'd look like we'd been in our spreadsheets all day."
The Bulletin Board
"So. Back in my third year of a 30+ year journalism career, I moved from a small city to a big, big city and wrote a letter to a friend in my former newsroom. Included in that letter was a paragraph not only talking up my new home, but also assailing the newspaper I had just left as "bush league" and essentially saying "I dust my shoes off on that little rag and everyone who works there." Six months later I was hired back at said newspaper, having returned ingloriously after making no impression at all on that big, big city. To my horror, I was standing at the employee bulletin board one morning, and saw my letter had been pinned there for all to see. For. Six. Months. To this day I still don't know how or why I was rehired given that gaffe. I think I hid my head behind my computer the rest of the day and managed to remove the letter later when I was sure no one was looking."
LinkedIn's Lament
"I worked at this ticketing company that barely paid anyone anything, but the worst department, by far, was customer service. Basically, you’d make $14 an hour to get yelled at all day by phone and on Saturdays, one person would have to come into the office and work alone at the desk from 8 to 5, answering calls. Anyway, it turns out that one of the front desk assistants spent one such Saturday mass applying to jobs on LinkedIn. Dozens. How do I know that? Turns out she was logged into the company account on LinkedIn, not her personal one, so when the Monday staff got in, the generic company email account (info@blahblahblah) had a million messages about application statuses including all the “Thanks [Name] for applying” details. No question it was her. She never showed up for her next shift.
The Address Fail
"I was working as a marketing associate at an interiors company. One of our 15 showrooms had just moved to a new building, and we were planning a shoot to show off the new digs. I didn’t really have much to do with the shoot, but my coworker was in charge of it. She'd scheduled all this newly upholstered furniture to be delivered in a big truck the day before. Suddenly she came running over and asked me to confirm the new address of the showroom. I froze. looked it up on the website and to my horror realized that the old address was listed. It had been my responsibility to update the website with the new address, and I just hadn’t done it yet. So the truck with all the furniture was en route to the completely wrong address on the other side of town. My coworker was hysterical, telling me she was going to lose her job if this furniture didn’t get delivered before the showroom closed. Luckily, they were able to reroute the truck and get the delivery taken care of, but I still shudder when I think of that day."
The "Tables Are Turned" Mistake
"When I was in college I landed an interview for an internship at a big fashion media company and couldn’t have been more excited about the opportunity. The pressure was on to have a killer interview outfit. I wore a new, and very expensive, white dress that looked perfect. Which my interviewer acknowledged…right before she dropped her coffee and splattered my dress with it."
Tell us your own horror stories in the comments below!
