I work at a grocery store as a bagger (HS job, not long term) and if the cashier doesn't scan something I most of the time won't say anything

Someone from a different department wanted to transfer an internal user to me for help with something. As soon as the transfer went through, the user said something had come up and she’d call back. I didn’t offer her my number to call me directly, nor did I ask for her number and offer to call her later. I said “ok,” and let her hang up.

I used to go the extra mile for the company. Now I do the minimum necessary for people to be satisfied with my work. Being generally friendly buys goodwill, too.

One time at a TV station I worked for, the manager of our marketing department decided that three $90k pieces of robotic studio camera equipment were actually fun toys with which he could (without training) just mess around. I came into the studio that day to find two of my fellow production department coworkers trying desperately to wrangle the situation. At one point, the manager nearly crashed two of these robots into one another and my co-worker threw himself onto the emergency stop switch halting the imminent collision and, potentially, tens of thousands of dollars of damage.

Knowing we had work to do with these units shortly and having been trained on how to reset everything after an emergency shutdown, I turned to the manager at the control panel. Y'all, as the words "wait let me help you reset it" were coming out of my mouth he shouted directly in my face "I said I fucking got it!" So... I threw up my hands and walked to the break room, which was across the hallway from the chief engineer's office. About two minutes later the marketing manager walked into the chief engineer's office saying "hey [chief engineer], we're having a problem with the studio robotics, can you come take a look?"

My coworkers told me that, the moment the door closed behind me, the manager turned back to the robotic controller and said "I don't think I've got this." An hour later, the GM sent out an email announcing basically "union shop rules" for the incredibly expensive robotic equipment... essentially: if you're not trained on them, don't touch and we weren't training anyone else. Come to find out that when my coworkers explained what happened to the chief engineer (who had fought corporate bean counters for nearly five years to get us these robotic units), he had apparently chewed the marketing manager out to the point of causing an HR situation and nearly succeeded in getting the idiot fired.

Since then, every time I realize that I am doing something that will make the company more money or even just save them money, I always think back to that moment of "I said I've fucking got it" and stop what I'm doing. I'll do a ton of extra work to make my job and my coworkers' jobs easier long term, but I am NEVER going to intentionally contribute to making any place at which I work run more profitably. It's just not worth it.

"if you don't like your job you don't strike, you just go in every day and do it really half-assed"

-Homer Simpson

The company I work for likes to hold a meeting every quarter to tell employees how the company is doing and they love to talk about the stock price as if we're supposed to care. Executives get rewarded with shares, not us, we'd have to actually use our own money to buy shares and the number of shares we'd be able to buy with our own salaries would be meager by comparison. Still, they proudly boast about share buybacks, while if you look at the publicly-available data, the execs are selling tons of shares (not just for tax purposes). So they're using company funds to pump up the stock price while offloading their personal shares. Real inspiring leadership, really drives me to put in more effort so they can get a bigger payout while I and everyone else gets diddly squat.

The free market capitalist types always wanna talk about incentives. Wages incentivize working exactly as hard as necessary to not get fired and not one iota more. Stock ownership incentivizes maximizing profit for the business: higher output, fewer sloppy mistakes, extra care and effort. Shockingly, workers are spontaneously encouraged to actively help the business succeed when they actually see a return on that increased success, who knew?

Today I was given a 1.3% raise and my 10% bonus was funded at 6%. Immediately after I was told that someone told me they were about to do something that could end up costing the company around $50k. I didn't stop them.

I love seeing those types of titles so often in lemmy :)

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