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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

It’s also a respect shortage, and a flexibility shortage, and a plannable scheduling shortage.

People will put up with almost anything for a price but they won't put up with eating shit while making shit wages. An executive assistant makes $100k+ to be a personal punching bag. And the main requirements for the job is be organized, be discrete, be willing to put up with a lot.

When I was a teenager, I was a little asshole to fast food and phone tech-support workers (basically falling into the "Karen" stereotype of people). I feel pretty bad about that now, because of course these people don't make nearly enough to put up with me being a douchebag to them. It's entirely possible that I ruined at least a few people's day by being a dick, for no other reason than I was unwilling to realize that people making minimum wage really shouldn't be yelled at unless they're mean first (which they generally aren't).

Nowadays I try and be extremely polite to people serving me food or checking me out at the grocery store, and make a point to only be mean to people whose job it is to be yelled at.

How about not being mean to anyone?

I don't think that's always the best policy; I agree that 99% of the time you should be nice to everyone, but there are times when a company simply will not do what you need them to do unless you're a bit of a douchebag to them.

I'm not saying you get personal and insult their mothers or anything, but being impolite and slightly aggressive is (sadly) sometimes necessary.

Just note that it's going to be very, very rare that the person you're being "impolite" to has influence to change the company in a way to "do what you need them to do".

Well said. Half the stuff on r/antiwork may be fiction, but it's fiction based on truth. Every story told there about unfair working conditions is true somewhere. There is a stunning documentary waiting to be made; identify about 20 stories on r/antiwork that are true, go investigate them and make a film about it.

Creating policy based on "truth inspired" creating writing is how we got the CFAA

I don't think I suggested making policy based on truth-inspired stories, and I didn't suggest spreading truth-inspired stories. What did I say that made you think that?

To be clear, I'm suggesting someone filter through the fiction and hyperbole and identify real cases of unfair working conditions and tell those true stories in a documentary. Filtering out the hyperbole is an important part, people need to be able to point to the documentary as a source of documented unjust treatment, something more reliable than Reddit.

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