A female boss I worked for, pulled an employee retention tactic that still gives me the chills.

She paid dogshit salaries to all her employees. And yelled at them enough to keep them overworked and burnt out.

When one of them tried to resign, she said "fine you can leave us but I won't be giving you any salary slips, no experience/recommendation letter and neither acknowledge that you ever worked here.
You get to leave the company when I decide for you.
You have already stayed here so long that if you decide to disappear tomorrow it will leave a gap on your resume in your next interview."

I never yell at co-workers but I did get yelled at quite a lot of times (2019 - pre covid).

I was leaving the office on time.

Just another reason I support people working from home.

Business logic:

Meeting starts at 9:45 AM. They only really wanna talk about the features they have on the horizon and how innovative and distruptive and rich we'll be. We spend 10, maybe 15 minutes talking about UI and details of the feaure. The meeting ends a few minutes before 12, so that's 2 hours of lunch (I wanna respect the schedules we had pre-covid to keep that rhythm). I start working again at 2 PM, but 15 minutes later, I get called again by one of the managers to hear more about this new great new idea they have.

So I work about 7-9 hours a day. But HR and management want to spend 3 of those hours. Suggestion: we'd improve our productivity by about 35% if we cut those daily meetings.

wow office is full of pessimistic and unhappy people. being a covid graduate i didn't knew the sadistic life of office goers . can some of you pre covid people share instances of a positive ofice environment that made you go to office each day?

Work is still going great, but I'm killing myself with general anxiety about other things...

Covid, laptop is gone for now, phone is acting up, I don't have any backup device, I'm running out of money, need to fix my teeth soon enough, health-wise I'm pre-diabetic and almost obese, (not look-wise, rather weight-wise) as well I will need to check for hormones because I'm growing body hair more than I should and still am losing head hair more than I should, and I should quit smoking.

... but I still love the work I do, so what does life and gods have against me? :|

I have been taking deep breaths more often to just not lose my shit these days. Like, unless I end up in a great situation next, this all is so unfair.