u/Bubbly_Release9995

i signed up for this gym that does personal training sessions. not cheap either. you book online and they have a strict cancellation policy. if you cancel within 24 hours you still get charged. fair enough.

i booked a session for saturday morning because i had a specific goal i was working toward and my trainer only had one slot left that week. i get stuck in traffic because there's an accident on the highway and i walk through the door two minutes past my session time. two minutes.

the girl at the front desk tells me my session has been automatically cancelled because their system cancels any booking if you're not checked in within two minutes of your start time. and yes i still get charged the full amount.

i ask if my trainer is available. she checks and says actually yes he's free right now because my session was the only one he had for the next hour. i ask if i can just go in then. she says no because the booking has been cancelled in the system and they can't process a walk in without a booking.

my trainer is literally standing ten feet away with nothing to do for the next hour and i can't see him because a computer said no.

i sit down in the lobby trying to figure this out. while i'm sitting there another member walks in early for her session. checks in no problem. goes straight in. her session isn't for another 25 minutes but the system let her check in early without any issues.

i ask the front desk if there's a rule against checking in early. she says no you can check in as early as you want as long as you have an active booking in the system.

so i pull out my phone. open the app. book the next available session with my trainer which happens to be monday morning. walk back up to the desk and say hi i have a booking for monday morning and i'd like to check in early. about 47 hours early.

she stared at me for ten seconds. looked at her screen. looked back at me. called her manager over. the manager read the policy twice and couldn't find anything that said you can't check in early. my trainer was already warming up the room.

i was in and out within 40 minutes. they updated the policy the following week. AITA?

i spent my first few years out of school working at a small startup. maybe 20 people total. everyone knew everyone. if you had a problem with someone you just said it. if your idea was bad someone would tell you to your face and you'd laugh about it and move on. the owner would sit with us at lunch and roast people and get roasted back. nobody was performing. people were just people.

if you were good at your job everyone knew it. if you were slacking everyone knew that too. there was no hiding behind titles or email chains or meetings about meetings. you just did your work and went home and nobody played games.

then i moved to a big corporate company thinking it would be a step up and career wise sure it was. but the culture is a completely different planet.

everyone talks in this weird corporate language where nothing means what it actually means. lets circle back means i'm ignoring this. i'd love your input means i need someone to blame if this goes wrong. great question means i don't have an answer. every conversation feels like people are running it through a filter before they say it.

and the politics are unreal. people will smile at you in a meeting and then throw you under the bus in an email to someone above you. everyone is obsessed with visibility and optics and making sure the right people see them doing things rather than actually doing things.

at the small company if someone didn't like you they'd just avoid you. at the corporate job someone who doesn't like you will compliment your presentation and then quietly block your promotion behind closed doors.

i'm not saying small companies are perfect because they're not. the pay was worse and there was zero structure and sometimes it was chaos. but at least the chaos was honest.

corporate just feels like everyone is acting in a play and nobody told me what character i'm supposed to be.