Unusual reason you got a promotion at work.

[Kira]

My apartment mate went to a party, fell asleep in a chair only to be shaken awake by a police sergeant in a black leather jacket.
He was hastened out the door, down the stairs and upon seeing a white heap on the sidewalk, was shown his boss' body.
The boss had jumped out the window.
Apparently the police were satisfied with his surprise and sent him on his way.

I got a phone call asking me to take care of his dog for a couple of days.
He filled me in when he returned.

Each one of those accountants went up a rung!

 

[PF52]

The reward for doing good work is more work. The better you get at something, the more is expected of you.

And conversely, the deadwood and the lazy slobs are given just enough work to do so they won't break a sweat pretending to look busy all day while they watch videos, play with their phones and chitchat. For example, the guy in the office next to mine and I both officially start our day at 7AM, except I always come in early and he always comes in about 8:45 every single day. I get more done by the time he gets on than he accomplishes in an entire week.

 

[svtrit]

I found out after taking the promotion and working in it a year that 3 other people said no. It made sense since I was really young and had only been with the company 9 months.

 

[Sumboodie]

Got hired, the 2 managers that hired me were let go 2 weeks after I started and suddenly had to do my job as well as theirs.
Went from 4 people to 2.

After ~6 months of that, my swap out threatened to quit if we weren't paid for the 2 jobs we had to do.

Got a new title and $4/hr raise.... which was kinda ****ty I later found, as the managers made around $35/hr.

Later got bumped from 70hr weeks to 84, about 2200 hrs a year and now it's about 2550 hrs.

We did almost 8 million in sales for 2024 with 2 total people.

I do everything from sales calls, and emails, delivering (cdl required), warehousing, facilities maintenance, equipment maintenance, janitor, etc.
Right now I work for a month straight then go home for 2 weeks.

 

[SevenBizzos]

What's a "promotion"? LOL.
I left my employer of 12 years over just that. That was my "promotion".

 

[Dave Hess]

Got hired, the 2 managers that hired me were let go 2 weeks after I started and suddenly had to do my job as well as theirs.
Went from 4 people to 2.

After ~6 months of that, my swap out threatened to quit if we weren't paid for the 2 jobs we had to do.

Got a new title and $4/hr raise.... which was kinda ****ty I later found, as the managers made around $35/hr.

Later got bumped from 70hr weeks to 84, about 2200 hrs a year and now it's about 2550 hrs.

We did almost 8 million in sales for 2024 with 2 total people.

I do everything from sales calls, and emails, delivering (cdl required), warehousing, facilities maintenance, equipment maintenance, janitor, etc.
Right now I work for a month straight then go home for 2 weeks.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

 

[tedsweet]

My first summer job, after one year of college studying Chemical Engineering, was in a chemical complex and I was assigned to the shipping and receiving department. Ran a fork lift, stacked boxes, swept floors. Paid Okay but I was really surrounded by a rough crowd and lunch drinkers.

I brown bagged and monitored the office phones during lunch hours. One day about 3 weeks into my S&R career, the phone rang and I picked it up and said something like “hello, this is the S&R office at xyz company. how can I help you”. Turned out the guy on the other end was the owner of the company and was used to the gruff “Wada-u-want?” way the dock manager answered his phone. He asked who I was and I went on to handle his concern about whether an important shipment had been made that morning. We had a nice conversation although I had no idea who he was.

Next day the site personnel manager walks down to the S&R department and pulls me out during the morning coffee break and gives me a white lab coat and walks me up to the QC lab and tells the lab manager he found the summer lab assistant he was looking for. New job came with a nice bump in hourly rate and the lab experience really helped me for the rest of my career.

All because I answered a phone properly. You never know….

by surviving longer than the others

 

[Chris142]

Everyone else died. I was the only one left

 

[64Deluxe]

I got my last work promotion because the guy who usually handles them (they’re distributed by seniority) broke his ankle playing golf, and the lady who filled in for him accidentally let me cut about 20 people in line.

 

[wwillson]

32 years ago, I walked into the IT director's office (I was not in IT and he was a very astute computer guy) and asked him if he had any ideas why my modem wasn't returning values for a couple AT commands. He asked what troubleshooting I had done, so I explained the whole process I went through to try to figure it out. He just looked at me for a awkward moment then said, "You need to be in IT". The next day I got called into HR, the IT director was waiting for me in the HR managers office. I thought I was getting fired for something I said when I was talking to him the previous day. They offered me a position in IT. I thought it would be fun, so I took it. I had no idea what I had just gotten myself into. It was fun and a ton of work. I had the option of learning quickly or moving out of IT quickly. It was sink or swim. I chose to swim. I worked my rear end off to learn as much as I could as quickly as I could. I was the guy willing to get there at 5:00AM and stay until everything was working correctly. I touched every system we had from PBX to routing and security. About 5 years down the road, I started working where I still currently work. That 5 years of busting rear still pays off to this day. My job is to be fairly deep and very wide. Without all the experience I got touching so many systems and applications, I couldn't do what I do today, which is talk to customers about how we can help their application run smoothly across a global network. That's 1000x more complex than most people realize.

I got involved with BITOG, because the database had crashed and the site had been down for a couple days. I emailed "admin" to see of they needed any help getting the site back up. I had LAMP server experience from my 5 year stint in IT and was able to get the site back up after a couple hours of troubleshooting. The rest is history.

 

[Kruse]

This wasn't a promotion, but an actual hiring.
I was nearing graduation and was interviewing at a company that had at that time about 35K worldwide employees. My interview was about 500 miles from school. I got my foot in the interview door of this company because of a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend type of connection, now currently called networking. My interview was about six hours long and I got interviewed by about a half a dozen engineers and one of them even took me out lunch. I was being interrogated by the last engineer and he really wasn't paying too much attention to my resume until he read all of it. At the very end of my resume was a listing of my hobbies. (Yea, I know you shouldn't put your hobbies on a resume, but this was almost 40 years ago ) My list of hobbies included softball. Suddenly, the interviewer's face lit up. "You like softball?" (I told him I did and gave my life history of slow-pitch softball) "How many positions do you play and how hard can you hit the ball?" (I'm 6'6" and won state a state championship my senior year playing football)
I got a notice a couple days later that there was a job opening for this company. The head engineer made sure that I was on his team that year and he took his sports pretty seriously. I worked there exactly 10 years and they offered me some huge incentives when I put in my notice, but there were other reasons for quitting, none related to the job itself.
All because I put on my resume that softball was a hobby.

 

[Shel_B]

I bought the company and married the (former) boss's daughter.

 

[UncleDave]

Normally it was because I held myself to a higher standard than the company did, which made me stand apart.

One company I worked for made the choice to promote a manager form a recent acquisition to a VP role and bypass me leaving me in a director role.

My counterpart on the East coast went rogue and started cheating and stealing creatively and cleverly in ways that would take someone with actual experience to understand and figure out, this larceny was discovered after about a year and concurrently the employee had resigned and left a deep ugly mess for someone to clean up.

When the top brass queried what I knew about any of it I pointed out they needed to ask his boss, their new boy wonder VP, as it was his job to manage this guy not mine. - I finished with the words REMEMBER he's the VP managing him , NOT me.

Ultimately the new VP was shown the door for incompetence and I was given the task of touring the East coast to find out how deep the rabbit hole went, and it was bad. I wouldn't accept it until promoted - and viola, I got the VP job I should have gotten in the first place.

I learned public companies often have a very interesting way of looking at fraud and theft - where the line is dotted, and where it is solid before they pursue an employee criminally.

 

[addyguy]

The new owner of the store wanted to move my Service Advisor into my position of Service Manager; so they promoted me ‘out of the way’ and made me a part of the Management team for the whole store with a pay raise.

 

[SwampSurvivor]

At my last job I got demoted in title and pay.

But got promoted with responsibilities and functions. There's a reason I left.

My current job I got promoted because I wasn't fully forthcoming on my resume and interviews. I didn't want to BS so unless I was an expert, I didn't claim it. They found out that I was better than resume apparently

 

[Pablo]

One place years back, manager's wife was gonna divorce him if they didn't move back to Cali.

I got the manager job.