Being helpful and vital at your job should be a great feeling. Truly, who doesn't want to feel valuable, to know that what you do every day is worthwhile?

However, even being valuable at work has its conditions. If your job is to do one thing, and suddenly you find yourself vital doing something else entirely, it might not feel as great as you thought. No one wants to find themselves doing someone else's work, as good as they may be at it. It's not their job, it's not their responsibility to be helpful or vital. 

That is what the employee in the story below is currently feeling. Instead of being valuable by doing their own job, they were found helpful simply because they continually go over a coworker's own work and find mistakes in it. It got to a point that even the coworker got tired of being helped all the time, and demanded that the employee stop correcting them.

When the employee complied, things started to go downhill for the coworker. However, the employee has no intention to go back to being their coworker's helpful elf…

End-of-year bonus season, just like the holiday season, arrives like a Hallmark movie, only this one is written by HR. Supposed to be magical. Mostly just paper plates and quiet resentment.  

This place used to go all out with a pizza party, which already says everything. One slice per person, bring your own drink, and try not to act too entitled while chewing through corporate gratitude. This year, management decided to "make it more personal" now that the team is down to four people doing the work of fifteen. Fewer humans, same delusion.  

So the boss shows up at the desk with that tight smile that means a speech is coming. Talks about value. Talks about appreciation. Talks about how much this contribution means to the company. Then hands over a card like it holds stock options. Inside is a five-dollar Dunkin gift card. Five. Dollars. The price of one drink, if no one breathes near the syrup pumps. But do not worry, it is extra meaningful because it "came out of her pocket."  

Meanwhile, there is an actual discretionary fund specifically for employee appreciation that just quietly resets if no one uses it. The company could have covered the coffee, the pizza, the bare minimum performance of gratitude. Instead, the choice is that workers can have crumbs and management can have a story about how much they care. 

From my experience, academic life is supposed to be nerds (me) arguing over footnotes, not professors circling grad students like side hustles, but apparently, job titles don't prevent people from acting opportunistic.

This advisor strings a student along for cheap labor, keeps shifting the finish line, and calls her work not even good enough for a master's. Then, the second she bails with a consolation degree, he suddenly decides that the same project is worthy of publication, just with him steering. When she reads the policies, she says Actually, no, that is mine, and blocks the paper. He reacts like she stole from him, not the other way around. He even reports her to the ethics people, who try to bluff about rules until she pulls the actual text and shuts it down.  

After that, he goes full neighborhood menace. Instead of letting it go, he starts doing slow rage walks past her house to glare, like a very low-budget ghost of academia. So she spends five dollars at Walmart and puts up a sign with his name and a simple message about stealing grad student research, directly in view of a daily school pickup line. He loses it. Takes photos. Brings his wife. Yells in the street. Tries to rope in the department and the cops to make the sign disappear, only to discover that embarrassment is not illegal. 

Anyone who worked in customer service knows that the saying "The customer is always right" could not be more wrong. In fact, the customer is often wrong, and they should know it. 

There is no reason to give entitled people exactly what they ask for just because they hold the "customer" title. Even if they leave the store slightly angry, it is better than allowing them to keep walking the earth, thinking they can get anything they ask for.

That is why the retail worker in the story below refused the demands of their entitled customer. First, she went into the tech store and bought a charger without a word. Then, she comes back two hours later, accusing the worker of not stopping her from buying the wrong charger for her iPhone. But the final straw was when she demanded to return the wrong charger without a receipt in sight.

The worker had no intentions to give in to the customer's demands, even if some would have claimed that the customer is always right.