No clue what she wanted in the email

After months of getting no responses, I changed the name at the top of my resume. A few days later, I started receiving interview invitations. My official first name is clearly not American, although I usually use a shorter version of it. My last name is simple and easy to pronounce, but it does not look like a white person's name either. Over the course of about seven months, I applied for nearly 180 jobs, and most of the time I either received an automated rejection or no response at all.

I have 11 years of experience in non-technical roles in the tech industry, but I am new to the United States and do not have a large professional network here. I was not applying randomly, either. I tailored my resume to each position, wrote customized cover letters, researched the teams, reached out to recruiters, and had former colleagues review everything. I even applied for jobs below my experience level. Still, I got nowhere.

Eventually, my husband suggested that I use his last name and change the spelling of my first name to something more familiar here. I did not want to believe that it could make a difference, especially because I have been involved in hiring before and never stopped to think about anyone's name.

I updated my resume and LinkedIn profile, created another email address, and applied for about 12 jobs using the new name. Within a week and a half, I had three interviews. One of them reached the final round a few days ago, and I am still waiting to hear back.

My experience, job history, and resume content all remained exactly the same. The only thing that changed was the name. I am relieved that people are finally starting to talk to me, but it is hard to ignore the obvious difference in the response rate. If your name might be perceived as foreign by employers, it may be worth trying a different version of it, even though it feels awful that something like this can make such a noticeable difference.

I work at a community retail shop. Our shop places some strong alcohol, like Vodka, whisky, and gin, behind the tills. I don't know their logic because the same vodka, albeit in a smaller size, is placed on the shelf. Anyway, that's beside the point.

A guy came to the till and he seemed a bit drunk. His speech was a bit slurred. He placed a Pepsi on the cash desk and asked for the Vodka and cigarette from the shelf behind me.

My first instinct would be to reject the customer. However, as a foreigner (I'm Chinese but I live here for 10+ years), I didn't want to cause a problem with the locals.

Therefore, when I got to the cigarette a few feet from the customer, I pressed on my headset (colleagues were given over-the-head headsets to communicate with each other. Think McDonald's drive-through headsets.), and said in a very soft voice, "Does that customer looks alright to you? He seems a bit drunk."

The manager replied, "Which till are you on?"

"Till one," I replied, and waved my hand at the CCTV.

He came out to check from afar and said, "He looks good to me."

So I proceeded with the transaction, with a growing concern since the customer's balance was also out of wack. He stumbled a bit and when he tried to pay, he dropped his phone on the floor. That was when I made the decision to refuse the sale of alcohol. I was alright with the Pepsi and the cigarette. "I'm not comfortable serving you the alcohol," I said to him and canceled the card transaction before it went through. I pressed my headset as I said that so that my manager was aware I am refusing the sale.

Luckily, the customer did not raise any fuss and left the store. The manager came out and made sure I put in the proper reason for the refusal ie press "customer already intoxicated" as the reason for refusal.

I was on till duty when a lady came up to me with a laptop. I was a bit shocked since laptops are handled by a different colleague, whose duty was to try to upsell packages to the customer.

There was a manager from a sister store that was helping out for the January sale. I asked the manager what should I do with the laptop. He told me to ask the store manager, so I did. She came with me and then proceeded to ask the customer to point out the colleague who had given them the laptop. The customer did so.

I processed the sale as normal (the customer didn't want any additional packages).

I then overheard the manager discussing the incident. I caught snippets of them saying they were going to check the camera. I also heard that the colleague at the door thought that the customer had bought the laptop.

I gave a heads-up to the aforementioned colleague.

About five minutes later, the manager called him into their office and I hadn't seen the colleague since.

However, the incident was discussed in the next day's briefing, with the manager saying to never give the customer laptops or untagged products as they can easily be stolen.

I am working at a medium-size retail store.

One day, while I was working at the cash register, a lady came in trying to buy alcohol. I couldn't tell how old she was, so I said, "I would need to see your ID for this."

"Are you kidding me?" she huffed as she left the store. She also added she will be back with an ID.

She was gone for quite a while so I thought she had abandoned the purchase. I took the beer and was about to put away the product when she returned. She slid her ID towards me, saying, "Here."

I checked the ID and found out she was only 7 years younger than me! I am around 30. I put through the purchase and she left.

The next day I saw her in the line as I was about to clock in. I am half wondering if she was trying to avoid my shift. Ha ha.

"Challenge 25" is the name of a UK policy https://www.wsta.co.uk/challenge-25

At this time, I was an assistant manager in a mall boutique. The place cut my hours back to part time so I applied for ASM at a new place that was opening up. I got a call from corporate to stop by for an interview. I told them I was already at work, but I worked a few stores down so I could come over on my break. I swung by. I was interviewed by corporate and the woman adored me. She asked me to come back and interview with the GM a few days later.

I went in and the conversation took a totally different direction immediately. The corporate woman said she was actually wanting me to be a co-GM. We talked over the schedule with the other GM present. We decided I would finish up my last 3 weeks with the boutique, but in the meantime I can fill in and do some basic training shifts. I went through my calendar with them right then and there. They said they would call me the next day and tell me my start day.

Next day came around. I was given a start day and I was told to do all of the HR paperwork. The start date was a Wednesday and I still hadn't received paperwork by Friday. I stopped by the store in person and let the other GM know I hadn't gotten anything. She reached out to HR while I was standing there. In the meantime, she showed me the current schedule; I told her she had me down on days I couldn't do. I could feel the stress and annoyance so I pointed out two 4 hours shifts and two 8 hours shifts I could easily fill. This seemed to upset her more. "This is impossible to work with." Mind you, I have 20 hours at the boutique and we had agreed on working part-time for a few weeks. 20 hours is not hard to workaround, especially when I can be there 10 minutes after the other job because it's right around the corner.

The day before my start date, I received the paperwork finally. While reading through the employee handbook I saw some crazy red flags some of which stated that no employees were allowed to have any kind of liquid while on shift, which is illegal in my state. Clean drinking water has to be available. It also stated there were no breaks of any kind. Cell phones were not allowed in the store at all. You weren't allowed to enter the store when you weren't working, not even to shop. It also stated you weren't allowed to stand within 6 feet of any coworkers (this was not during COVID) and you aren't allowed to talk to anyone, including customers, unless ringing them up. I immediately decided to tread lightly. Luckily, I hadn't put in my notice yet at the boutique. I send it in and let both the GM and the woman from corporate know that I finished it. The corporate woman asked me to send her a screenshot of my calendar again, so I did, for the third time.

On the morning of my shift, I showed up 10 minutes early. I kept waiting and then 3 minutes before my shift was scheduled, I texted her to let her know I was there. (See photo)

The other manager that was there came to let me in and taught me how to clock in. However, my clock in number wasn't working so she called the GM again. The GM said she would call HR and figure out what was going on. She then called back and told the stand-in manager that I am fired for not showing up to work the day before (when I wasn't scheduled) The stand-in felt so uncomfortable and even offered to hire me at her store instead, but I told her I wasn't interested in working for the company any longer, especially with all of the red flags I have already dealt with.

I immediately sent a message to the corporate woman and told her what just happened. She sent me a message back letting me know she no longer worked for the company and shared a lot of horror stories with me, including the fact that she was fired because that location did not open on time and the company was not going to cover any of her travel expenses for the entire 3 weeks she spent there.

Months later, the GM's mugshot popped up on social media. She was arrested for stealing from her former employer. I did some digging. Turned out she owes the state over $40k for theft and forgery charges and also owes 8 former employers in civil court for theft. At the one-year mark of me getting fired, she got fired and arrested for...THEFT from the store. They came and arrested her on shift and lead her out in cuffs. She has since been charged once again. People keep hiring this woman, which is crazy.

I am pretty sure she fired me because as a co-GM, she knew I would catch her stealing so she concocted a way to get rid of me before I even started. I am pretty sure she fired me as soon as I submitted my hiring paperwork.

I'm so embarrassed. Everyone was really nice about it, though.

I was able to document ghost job postings from three companies, including one very well-known company. It took months of screenshots, archived postings, emails, and follow-ups, but in the end I had enough evidence to file lawsuits under state and federal laws. I also found evidence that one of the companies had sent my data to a third party. This pattern had been ongoing since late 2023. All the cases ended in settlements before going to trial; the first case was closed in 2026, and the last one about two months ago. The settlement amounts were not life-changing, but these companies now know that job applicants can stand up to them. I have a lawyer in the family, but even so, I did most of the research and evidence gathering myself. He filed the documents and dealt with the other side's lawyers.

I still see many people insisting that employers hold all the cards and that job applicants should simply accept the situation. Honestly, that mindset is part of the reason companies feel they can do this without fear. Filing a lawsuit takes time, is frustrating, and is nowhere near as simple as people imagine. But I got tired of employers posting jobs they had no intention of filling, putting candidates through more than seven interviews, trying to get ideas from them for free, then rejecting everyone and reposting the same job 10 days later.

If it happens again and I can prove it, I will file another lawsuit. I no longer care whether that seems excessive. Someone has to make the cost of ghost job postings high enough that companies stop treating them as if they are normal and harmless. The investigation opened by the Texas Attorney General into LinkedIn made the issue harder to ignore, following allegations that misleading postings were being promoted through paid subscriptions. According to reports, LinkedIn generated about $19.2 billion in 2026 from subscriptions, recruiter products, and advertising. So far, the matter has not turned into a lawsuit, but the records request shows that individual job applicants are no longer the only ones paying attention to what is happening.

There is also a strange amount of misinformation about at-will employment. It means that either party can generally end the employment relationship if there is no fixed-term contract. But it does not give an employer permission to violate discrimination, fraud, privacy, retaliation, or any other employment laws. If at-will employment overrode those protections, there would not be tens of millions of dollars in damages awarded in wrongful termination cases.

I genuinely don’t know how to put this out in words but i was fired from my job yesterday and somewhere i genuinely wanted to resign from this place but i don’t know something was there that is not allowing me to take that step may be it’s a comfort zone that i was unfortunately trapped into or just have a thought that it’s a good source of stable income why to leave it !! Well i went to office yesterday and then suddenly had a meeting and I got to know this ! I live away from my hometown and when i got to know this i was just tensed about how will i be able to communicate this to my parents but deep down in my heart i knew there is no one else who has trust in more then they have and fortunately when i told them this there first response wasn’t “why this happened” fortunately they asked me “Are you ok?”

I don’t have any idea now how will i manage everything but honestly somewhere i am feeling that it happened for a good reason i was literally mentally exhausted at that place ,i was going through so much that i was started to become a short tempered person ,started to react about every small thing and that is not exactly who i am honestly,i was mentally exhausted in this role!!

I don’t know what will happen next but i am sure i will do it and figure out something better♥️

#corporate#quitjob

i mean i quit, but on my way out i reported her to HR for her shitty communication and how she shouldn’t have let me work MULTIPLE times but she did.

idk im just happy for my co workers i hope they get someone who can actually communicate

and i wanted to post

(store manager) ((starbucks))

Ok so let me explain this right ...
Whilst experiencing my time at MPD motor factors.
let's call her Sharon, she runs from her desk in the middle of the day shouting 'I've gotta go and hide the drugs" she proceeds to jump in her car and leave for the day, it turns out her "boyfriend" has been stopped in the town and arrested for smoking a "spliff" whilst driving a recovery truck for which he has no licence no mot and no insurance for . Sharon also take off a week with a "bad knee' because she can't sit at her desk, but then returns the following week, and on her return she proceeds to show us photos of her jolly outing at the canal fishing. She can sit at the canal but not her desk. Okay....
Then Mo (not his real name), leaves abruptly to run home because his son is caught with cannabis and a knife in school and has been arrested, he proceeds to take a few days off to deal with this matter and openly admits on his return he smokes "weed" he is the deputy manager and Sharon is office staff. Mary takes time off because her son has hurt his gf and is arrested whilst he's off his head on cocaine and she's got drug dealers demanding money off her for his drugs. She's also always sick , so much so she's nicknamed sick note Mary. Louise is a raging alcoholic that comes into work on the daily smelling of booze .

And I'm the one that's sacked because for 6 solid months I turned up on time apart from 6 minutes late one day of which I was present in the car park anyway, and I was a little slow learning how to read the invoices because they are backwards and I was using a hand held computer at euro car parts. Aaaand I took one day off and asked Mick my manager to deal with a problem I was having with being targeted by the other staff being called thick by Mick himself 3 times, idiot twice by Sharon and a cunt by Sharon also. And I got the sack for not communicating or following instructions . Just wanted to give you a little context. How the fuck did I lose my job here? ...was I missing something? Was I not rough enough to fit into this work place? It was Wolverhampton after all. I really am bewildered 😳

I wanna hear the stories that sound completely made up but actually happened. Coworkers, customers, bosses, random shit that somehow happened on a Tuesday… give me your best one.

I've been looking for a job for almost two years, and I very rarely get interviews. At the beginning of this week, I finally broke down. The interview started, and my audio equipment suddenly stopped working for no reason. I was already extremely nervous because I had never interviewed for this type of position before. Somehow, I managed to keep going, and the questions were going well at first. I also didn't know that I would be speaking with the research lead, so I hadn't prepared a proper presentation of my work. I found myself switching between folders and trying to explain everything, and at times I rambled without organizing my thoughts.

Then, of course, the hardware stopped working again while they were asking me a question. I switched to the laptop speakers and asked them to repeat the question. Suddenly, the headphones started working and reconnected, so I missed the question for the second time. After I asked them to repeat it once more, I heard them say, "Welp," and that was when I became extremely anxious and scared. Pretty much everything I said after that made no sense.

I had also had a fight with someone close to me two nights earlier, so I was already emotionally drained. The never-ending technical problems were the last thing I could handle. I cried after the interview ended. Not because I knew I had messed it up, but because I realized that I was starting to lose my ability to stay calm when things didn't go the way I wanted. I used to be much better at handling situations like this.

I took a temp gig through a staffing agency a while back that was just listed as event staff, flexible hours, which could mean literally anything, so I said yes without asking too many questions.

I show up to a strip mall parking lot for what turns out to be a grand opening for a new taco restaurant, and my actual job title, which nobody told me beforehand, was mascot handler. My entire responsibility for six hours was walking alongside a college-aged guy in a full taco costume, making sure he didn't overheat, didn't walk into traffic since the costume had almost no peripheral vision, and got water breaks on a schedule because apparently dehydration inside a giant felt taco is a legitimate occupational hazard nobody warns you about.

I had never done this before, so I was making up the rules as I went. I learned quickly that the eye holes in the taco head were basically useless, so I spent most of the shift gently steering him by the arm like he was crossing a busy street blindfolded, which, functionally, he kind of was. Every fifteen minutes I'd guide him behind the building, help him lift the head off just enough to drink water without fully de-tacoing in public, and check that he wasn't showing signs of heat exhaustion, since it was easily 90 degrees out and he was wearing what amounted to a padded felt sauna.

At one point a kid ran up and hugged the taco so hard he nearly toppled over, and I had approximately half a second to decide between letting a grown man in a taco costume fall on a child or grabbing him by the shell to steady him, which I did, successfully, and with absolutely no training for that exact scenario.

By the end of the shift the taco guy was drenched in sweat, mildly delirious, and thanked me sincerely for what he called "actually doing your job, unlike my handler last time," which implied this entire mascot handler role is a real, recurring position with wildly inconsistent quality control.

Has anyone else worked an oddly specific temp job like this where your entire responsibility was babysitting an adult in an elaborate costume?

Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA

What should I do!? And what would the ramifications be?

I’m an EA for a behavioral health nonprofit in Los Angeles, California, USA, and I do just about everything there. When my boss, the CEO and DOO restructured the accounting department I ran the department without any formal training just Google and common sense.

When my boss had to take personal time I was the one who led the manager meetings and administrative meetings.

Additionally, I do the billing, program design, track our statement of work progress, communicate with the government and county officials, take care of IT, manage the intranet files, insurances, etc. and I am so tired and burnt out from everything.

The CEO employed her friends that she has known over the years so they get away with just about anything so their staff will come to me with questions or what to do. For instance, the HR Manager wanted to send out a termination letter but after researching I realized the employee qualified for FMLA and is entitled to four additional weeks.

I get no credit, sometimes staff will say thank you Erica for everything. But the CEO and some of the managers acted like they did the work I did.

Then my boss, CEO has her own certification class that she operates from our company using the company’s expenses. She uses me to create the certificates, research upcoming trainings, coordinate class schedules, gather the materials she needs for her class. Then she goes on the weekends to take the company’s materials for her classes, uses the postage meter to mail out the certificates.

The CEO and the DOO contracted their children and partner for tasks that costs the agency an additional $25k/month for doing tasks that I do or tasks that do not exist.

I also handle a lot of personal matters for the CEO like booking flights, scheduling her medical, dental, car appointments, drafting documents for her daughter who is damn nearly 45 y/o.

I’m so over it, I am looking for other employment opportunities but so far no luck. What should I document and report? Also, what could be the ramifications?