Hypocrisy Workplace Short Stories & Novels

It took me three months to get our company retreat venue down to $200 a head. All 120 people in the company thought it was a steal, and they couldn't stop telling me so. Then Chloe, the new intern, tagged me in the company group chat. "Ryan, Cookie says this lodge will do $150 a person. You quoted $200. Where did the other fifty go?" Our boss decided on the spot: "Chloe's running the retreat." And all hundred-plus people in the company decided I'd been taking kickbacks. I stared at the screen and typed two words. "Sounds good." What she didn't know was that the $200 was a family rate, one I'd earned by working three months as a server for my dad. The public price? It starts at $380.

When the company’s bionic robot was announced to the public, its stock price skyrocketed tenfold overnight. As the Principal Engineer, I received a year-end three-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus. The next day, an intern named Alaina Zeller and the company’s vice president, Vincent White, cornered me at the restroom entrance. Vincent scowled and glanced at his watch. “Joel, you were in there for fifteen minutes. You mind explaining that?” I did not grasp what was happening and answered casually, “I was using the restroom.” Alaina reacted as if she had caught me red-handed. She pointed at me and shouted, “See, Mr. White?! Mr. Lakely is literally getting paid to take a dump!” Completely bewildered, I tried to explain myself. “It’s Sunday. I’ve been pulling all-nighters for three days straight, fixing bugs. Can’t I even go to the restroom now?” Vincent ignored my explanation and said pointedly, “Your behavior is completely unacceptable. As the company’s Principal Engineer, you’re setting a terrible example for the entire team. “Your entire year-end bonus is hereby withdrawn. Consider this a warning to everyone.”

My coworker, Linda Sullivan, loved taking advantage of people. She borrowed my electric scooter for an urgent errand. When she finally returned it, it wouldn’t run. I brought it in for repairs and the mechanic told me someone had swapped the battery. I stormed straight back into the office to confront Linda, but before I could finish laying out what happened, she turned the tables on me. "I switched your battery?” Linda shrieked, “Where's your proof? Show me some real proof right now, or I'm suing you for slander!" What she didn't know was that my original battery was already defective. If she refused to give it back to me, whatever happened next would be entirely on her.

When the kiss cam swept across the stands at the baseball stadium Warren Doyle, a married investor in the league, had his arms around his PR director and was kissing her. The two of them went up on the jumbotron, and the crowd erupted in hoots and cheers. Warren stormed into the camera bay and demanded I hand over my camera. I told him the camera pointed wherever the control room told it to. He stared at me for a few seconds, then suddenly let go and let me leave. I thought that was the end of it. The next day, audio from the crew channel shot to the top of the news feeds, with nothing left in it but two ambiguous lines from me. "Camera locked on row seven. Keep rolling. Don't cut." Overnight I became the shameless camera operator who'd filmed them on purpose. I was suspended from my job, my father's food cart was trashed, and Warren sued me for a million dollars. But he didn't know that the recording he was using to convict me could only ever convict him.

After a grueling year of training abroad on the company's dime, I came home holding an OEM certification for our high-end production line. Only three people in the country had it. I couldn't wait to cash in my stock options and finally give my girlfriend, Nora, a home of our own. But when I got back to the office, there was no celebration waiting. Just three notices. [Finance: $50,000 travel reimbursement rejected. $20,000 in salary frozen as a performance hold, to be released after your review is passed.] [HR: Your sponsored training carries a mentoring obligation. You must train three qualified technicians within one month of returning, as your assessment. Fail, and your travel costs will not be reimbursed and your frozen salary will be forfeited.] [Direct Manager, Kevin: Turn over all core technical documentation. Effective tomorrow, you're reassigned to the factory floor for mentoring.] I gripped the three notices and headed for the manager's office to demand an explanation. I pushed the door open and froze. Nora, my girlfriend of three years, was sitting on Kevin's lap, her clothes half undone. Our eyes met. All she gave me was one cold line. "Ethan, since you've already seen it, let's just break up." I backed out of the office without a word. I walked past all the eager faces waiting for a show, went back to my desk, and finally answered the email that had been sitting in my inbox for a week. [I've decided to accept your offer. I can start in a month.] One month. Everything this company owed me, I was going to take back myself.

The annual performance review came around. I was the company's top revenue generator. They gave me a D. I looked at the evaluation form in my hand and laughed, because the alternative was worse. "A D? No raise? You people call this a comprehensive assessment?" Even a dog that drags a forty-five-million-dollar deal home gets a couple of bones for it. Sonia Blake, our HR director, was busy touching up her lipstick. She didn't bother to look up. "Ethan, don't get arrogant. This company values character. It values teamwork. You lean too hard on individual heroics. The D was a unanimous decision by the board." "So that's the justification for wiping out my entire year-end bonus and cutting my pay twenty percent?" I didn't understand. That was when my direct supervisor, and the man I hated most in the building, Grant Palmer, walked in. "If you don't want the job, you can leave." He was flushed with satisfaction, waving around the letter of intent I had just closed. One and a half billion dollars. "Sonia, why are you still arguing with him? Ethan, here's the termination agreement. Sign it. And while you're at it, hand over the core code for the new platform." Use a man up, then throw him away. Fine. Wonderful. I picked up the pen and signed my name across the agreement with a flourish. "I hope you don't come begging me to come back."

After I left prison, my best friend and I opened an auto repair shop together. He provided the money, while I brought the skills. We agreed from the start to split the profits seventy-thirty. Thanks to my talent for performance tuning and custom car builds, our shop quickly became the talk of the local wealthy car‑enthusiast scene. In our first year alone, we cleared a net profit of eight million. When I went to collect my share at the end of the year, my so‑called brother handed me a check for only one hundred thousand. “The business is doing well because I became friends with those rich kids,” he said with a dismissive laugh. “Anyone can modify cars. Do not tell me you actually think you are someone special.” He looked at me with open contempt. “Most repair shops pay their mechanics six grand a month at best. I am giving you ten. You should be grateful.” I stood there in stunned silence, and anger rose in my chest. I had trusted him like family, only to discover that my loyalty had been repaid with lies and betrayal. I quit on the spot without another word. I rented the workshop across the street and opened a repair shop of my own. Six months later, he showed up at my door with all his arrogance gone. “If you come back,” he pleaded, “I will pay you five hundred thousand a year. That should be enough to keep you with me this time… right?”

As the project lead, I was supposed to receive an annual bonus of $28,000. However, my wife transferred all the money to her newly hired male assistant and simply tossed me a supermarket gift card instead. “There’s $30 on this card. Buy whatever you want. I’m pretty generous, aren’t I?” I was stunned. “Joy, my mother needs that money for her surgery. You can’t be serious!” She sneered and said, “Why waste money on someone who’s dying anyway? At most, I’ll give you $700 to pick out a nice coffin.” Looking at her smug face, I smiled as well. Joy probably forgot that although she held all the company shares, the core patents of the company were registered under my personal name. I immediately sent a message to my lawyer. [Starting today, I’m releasing all patents in my name for free!]

At half past two on Friday afternoon, I walked past the break room when snippets of hushed conversation drifted through the half-open door and caught my attention. "Have you heard? Steven is keeping a college girl on the side." "What?" "Issac posted pictures in the executives' group chat last night. Steven was spotted outside a hotel late at night with a girl who looked barely 20." "No way. Mr. Lane always seemed like a decent guy." "The pictures do not lie. I heard the director brought it up at today's meeting and said the company would investigate the matter thoroughly." I pushed the door open and walked inside. The two interns turned deathly pale the moment they saw me. "M-Mr. Lane." "Go on. Do not let me interrupt." I filled a cup with water, then turned and walked out. My phone vibrated. A message from Issac appeared in the department group chat. [Someone's been engaging in some seriously questionable behavior outside of work. The company needs to investigate this thoroughly.] He attached three photos. I tapped them open and froze for a moment. In the pictures, my wife, Kayla Stone, and I stood outside a hotel. Her arm was linked through mine, and a sweet smile rested on her face as she leaned against me.

When I took my diagnosis of heart failure to my boss and asked for time off, he shot me down with two words. "Not approved." I pointed to the diagnosis. "I could drop dead at any moment." He pushed the report back to the edge of his desk. "But you're not dead yet, are you? This project is at a critical stage. Don't even think about slacking off and trying to get out of work." I stared at him for two seconds before nodding. "Fine. You win." The next day, I walked into the conference room right on time with a portable medical oxygen tank. Everything suddenly went black while I was presenting the fourth version of our proposal to the client. I had collapsed face-first onto the conference table. My boss finally froze when he saw that I was on the brink of death.

I'm Brixton's most notorious spoiled heiress. All because I refuse to back down in a feud with my nemesis, I keep raising my bids at the auction, making sure no one can outbid me. Dad is so furious that he cuts off my cards and throws me into the family business to experience real life. On my first day at work, the department happens to be doing a thorough cleanup. I stare at the spin mop, genuinely baffled. "How do you wring this thing out?" Sandy Melville, another intern who started at the same time as me, gives me a condescending look. "Seriously? In this day and age, there are still people who don't even know how to use a mop? If you're going to put on airs, at least have some common sense." "Mariam does all this stuff at home," I explain, releasing the mop. "I've never had to do it myself." Soft snickers immediately ripple through the room. A few colleagues exchange looks, shaking their heads or smiling in disdain. "Girl, I get it. You're one of those fallen heiresses who thinks she's the main character in a rags-to-riches story and wants to reform the workplace." "Can you stop binge-reading those trashy billionaire romance novels? Sandy is Mr. Melville's daughter, and even she doesn't put on airs like you do." I say nothing. Instead, I turn and walk into the break room, pull out my phone, and call Mom. "Mom, I think Dad might have another daughter out there."

Due to my outstanding performance, Mdm. Hall granted me flexible working hours. After a full night of entertaining clients, I had barely fallen asleep when a colleague’s call jolted me awake. “It’s already 9:30 a.m.! How could you be late again?” I patiently explained that I had worked late signing contracts last night. So, I would not be coming into the office this morning. However, my colleague scoffed. “Don’t think that being the top salesperson gives you free rein to skip work! “The heiress, Ms. Hall, is visiting the office for the first time today! “If you upset her, you’d better watch out. She’ll have you fired!” I pushed through my headache and searched my memory. The heiress he mentioned was Cadence Hall. If I was not mistaken, she was the woman who had been desperate to marry into my family.

In my previous life, my brother and fiancé teamed up to sabotage my company for the sake of my so-called best friend. After I went bankrupt, they stood beside her watching me collapse in the pouring rain, laughing mockingly at my pathetic state. "Linda Turner, you look as pathetic as a drenched dog!" they sneered. When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the project bidding meeting three years earlier. In my previous life, when my company was just starting out, my brother and fiancé had warned me against using the Turner and Peterson family connections. They claimed it wouldn't be fair to others, but then turned around and handed projects to my best friend under various pretexts, just to see her smile. Now that I was back, I watched them secretly manipulating things just like before, giving my projects to my best friend. I finally gave up on them completely. When they found out I was leaving the country, my brother and fiancé set off fireworks all night, celebrating that they'd finally gotten rid of me, the burden. But three years later, at the Trada Corp's bidding meeting, I took the stage as the CEO's wife—and they couldn't hide the redness in their eyes.

For three years, I worked for my coworkers for free—designing, covering for their mistakes, cleaning up their messes. They used my work to get promoted, to win awards, even to run side jobs on the sly, and I never took a cent for any of it. Then I single-handedly landed the hardest client project the company had ever taken on and walked away with a hundred-thousand-dollar bonus. That was the day everyone lost their minds. The same people who'd leeched off me the hardest led the charge, cornering me at my desk and tearing into me in front of the whole office. "The whole concept for that project was a team effort. What gives you the right to keep the bonus for yourself?" "Your work has always been garbage. That free labor of yours was never worth anything anyway!" Worse, they spent the whole night digging up old grievances, stitching together every minor slip-up they could find, and spreading rumors through the entire company—that I'd stalled projects, that my work was worthless, that I'd tanked the department's numbers. Finally, they gave me an ultimatum. "Either split the entire bonus with the department, or pay us two hundred thousand dollars for our trouble. Take your pick." Even the department manager tried to smooth things over, telling me, "We're all colleagues here. You've already got a big bonus—taking a small loss won't kill you. Don't be so difficult about it." Wonderful. So three years of quietly covering for everyone had just produced a pack of lazy, credit-stealing backstabbers. Since they wanted to gang up on the one person who'd always played fair, fine. I was going to lay out three years of original files, timestamps, and proof of exactly who'd done the work—all of it, all at once. And what none of them knew was that the special project behind my bonus was an AI system built to replace every single one of them.

After I graduate from college, my uncle, Malcolm Caldwell, convinces my family to chip in and open a seafood restaurant. Dad and I wholeheartedly agree with his suggestion. Since then, we work as the restaurant's cooks. Five years later, our seafood restaurant becomes the top restaurant on the city's Must-Eat List. Our monthly profits hit more than 200 grand. On the day the earnings are to be split among us, Uncle Malcolm pockets 150 grand. Then, he passes 150 grand each to my cousins, Maxwell and Melanie Caldwell. The remaining sum, which is less than eight grand, is handed over to Dad and me. When faced with our questions, Uncle Malcolm adapts a matter-of-fact tone. "Max is in charge of dealing with the customers. He has suffered a lot just by having to deal with so many fussy customers every day. "Mel is the one in charge of the finances. She's worked so hard calculating every cent in the profits that we've earned." Then, Uncle Malcolm turns to look at us. "As for you two, all you do is hide in the kitchen all day. I bet you two have secretly taken many bites out of the customers' food all these years, right? "Since we're relatives and all, I shall not hold you accountable. How about this? If you two work hard, I'll make sure to reward you well if our profits double again next month." Dad is so furious that he's practically shaking. But I just hold his hand calmly and accept the money. "Fine. You can split up the shares however you want, Uncle Malcolm. I'm fine with it." Soon, they will realize that Dad and I are the actual profit generators, not them.

End of the year. I was gonna use my bonus to treat Mom to a quick getaway. Instead? No bonus. Four hundred bucks sliced off my paycheck. I shot the HR supervisor a notice—three days to pay up. She laughed. Called me dramatic. Fired me right then. Coworkers backed her. Said I brought it on myself. Said I didn't care about the company. What they didn't see? I laughed the second I got that termination letter. Double severance? Come to mama.

In the third year the law firm was established, Claire Stone joined the firm as an assistant. From then on, my boyfriend started buying breakfast for her. My childhood friend also drove her to and from work. As for me, I became the wicked woman who bullied the newbie. The repeated disappointments made me decide to expel them from my life. So I agreed to a marriage contract with someone else, and while my boyfriend and childhood friend mocked me, I left the firm we had formed together. Later, they learned that they had been showering all their love and attention on a spy sent by a rival law firm. When they regretted their actions and asked me to go back to them, my husband sent them an invitation to our wedding.

When I was fifteen, my father brought home the daughter of the man who had once saved his life. He told me, "Stella, Hazel is your sister now. You need to be more understanding with her." From that day on, everything I had became something my father could freely give to Hazel. I cried and asked him if he no longer loved me. But he stroked my head and reassured me, "I am only doing this to repay a debt. Don't worry. I'll leave all my assets and the company to you." It was not until I graduated from college that I happened to overhear Hazel sweet-talking my father. "Dad, I like Julian. Could you get Stella to break off her engagement with him and let me have him? "Besides, Stella didn't study business management in college. Why don't you let me join the company and help out? I could take some of the burden off your shoulders." I clenched my fists, anger churning in my chest. For all these years, I had given in to her again and again. And now she wanted to take not only my fiance, but my inheritance as well?

At lunch I'd barely finished handing around the beef jerky I'd made when our department manager, Derek Pritchard, followed the smell to my desk. He grabbed a piece, tasted it, and announced at full volume. "Dylan, this is good. Way better than anything you'd buy to go with a beer." Before I could get a modest word out, his tone shifted. "Perfect timing. The owner isn't coming to the department dinner tomorrow night, so there's no sense throwing money around." He pulled three hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and slapped them on my desk. "We'll eat in the break room. Dylan Woodward's doing the cooking. There's your grocery budget. "Twenty people in this department. Spend it carefully, but I want drinks, I want meat, and I want a couple of real entrees." Three hundred dollars? For twenty people? A project I'd led had brought the company a serious profit, and I'd worn the owner down over weeks to get thirty thousand dollars approved for a team retreat. Derek meant to pocket nearly all of it and have me cover the difference so he could look generous. Looking at that oily, entitled face, I smiled. "Sure. Since you think that highly of me, Derek, I'll lay it all out nice and clear." Then I turned away and texted the owner. "Aunt Victoria, the budget came through. We're having a surprise department dinner tomorrow night. Care to come taste it?"

I was the company's marketing director, but my salary had always been only sixteen hundred dollars. One day, Timmy Sunderland from finance accidentally sent the payroll spreadsheet to me by mistake. On it, I saw the lines: Technical Director–10,000 dollars. Marketing Assistant–5,600 dollars. Receptionist–2,000 dollars. It also clearly stated that my salary was ten thousand, but most of it had been deducted and given to Timmy! Only then did I realize that after a decade of service at this company, they still treated me worse than everyone else. I rushed into the office belonging to my boss, Jessica White. "I want an explanation." She said to me, "This is a business decision, and I'm not at liberty to explain anything to you. Haven't you always been the one who understood me the best?" Because I had feelings for Jessica, I gave in. A few days later, when the holiday arrived, I did not rest. I went out to negotiate an investment of five million for the company. I treated the client to dinner and drank with him until I suffered internal bleeding. When I took the receipt of 2,000 dollars to Timmy for reimbursement, he transferred only 100 dollars to me and even said I was just trying to take advantage of the company. Jessica also scolded me to my face. "Only incapable people need to spend that much on clients. Timmy's right, you're just trying to take advantage of the company." This time, I decided not to endure it any longer. In anger, I quit and joined another company. The first project that I was put in charge of was worth over ten million, and Jessica's company was the investment target…