You know what they say: "The early bird gets the worm." But in this case, being early to work backfired on this lawyer. It's a tough job market out there, and you can lose a job for a number of reasons – layoffs, poor performance, absences and tardiness, and apparently, being early? 

In this instance, we have a lawyer who'd start work in the wee hours of the morning in order to finish at a decent hour and spend time with his wife and kid. He'd come in around 6:00 a.m. and finish his day at 5:00 p.m. The other lawyers would put in the same amount of hours but just at a later timeframe, starting around 8:00 a.m., going to the pub together at 5:00 p.m., and then working until 9:00 p.m. Despite consistently being the first one in the firm each day, the early bird was let go because, to his bosses, it looked like he was slacking. 

Among many red flags in the workplace, not valuing an employee's time and hard work is one of them. Is time even real, anyway? We live on a floating rock floating through space. How dare a man want to get out of work a little early to spend time with his wife and kid…

There is always a big transition when a smaller company gets bought by a larger one, and that transition takes time and patience. However, sometimes, the way in which the workplace used to be run was better for everyone involved, so when some fancy guy in a suit comes in and starts implementing annoying changes, it's inevitable that those changes will be met with some resistance.

In this instance, we have an employee who now has to clock out every time he takes a break. However, according to the new system, he discovered that efvery break is clocked at 30 minutes no matter how long the break actually is. This meant that the employee was able to take breaks lasting one or two hours while complying with the new policy. Talk about a perfect situation! The best part is that if he were confronted with probing questions, he can say that he literally was just following HR's orders like any other loyal and compliant employee!

Reality television is a foundational pillar of modern media; perhaps the sole reason anyone continues to pay their cable bill each month in 2025. From Big Brother to Jersey Shore to Love Island, reality television has always shown the dramatic, alluring, and ugly sides of the human experience. But that's the point, isn't it? It functions as a lesson; it exposes the gritty side of love, friendship, betrayal, and everything in between. The genre awakens a strange morbid curiosity in its viewership, influencing those who consume reality television content ravenously and desperately begging for more.

The most recent episodes of Love Island USA, however, have made something strikingly apparent: Reality television is dangerous. A genre dedicated to capitalizing on real people's triumphs (but mostly the defeats) creates and coddles a burning narcissism that we all possess but manage to suppress. With the cameras and boom mics grabbing every angle, nook, and cranny, and seeking that one sound bite to misrepresent in editing, the genre actively chooses to glamorize people in real crises under the guise of a "game." Though it's easy to laugh and poke fun at the interesting "characters" on our screen, it's important to remind ourselves that they are not characters in the slightest—they are victims of the reality television genre… and we're perpetuating it.