A Chinese man has attracted the envy of his entire country after reportedly winning 365 days of paid leave in a generous raffle organized by his company.

In a viral video that has been circulating on Chinese social media for about a week, a young man can be seen sitting on a chair in what looks like a banquet hall and holding a large sign that reads “365 days of paid leave”. It wasn’t long before the footage drew the attention of mainstream news outlets who managed to identify the location shown in the video and thus the event that took place there. It turns out that this was recorded during the annual meeting held by a company in Shenzen whose management wanted to ease the tension of its employees by offering fun and enticing prizes in a raffle.

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A company in Chengdu, China has been praised for asking both job applicants and recruiters to wear masks in order to avoid discrimination based on looks.

Chengdu Ant Logistics recently made news headlines after a video showing its recruitment process went viral on Chinese social media. Shot by one of the interviewees, the short clip shows several masked people waiting to be interviewed by a recruiter, who was reportedly also masked. The company has since put out a statement on the matter, claiming that the video was shot at its recent biannual recruitment fair and that the masked were introduced to eliminate bias based on looks.

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A Spanish woman recently lost a court battle against the company that fired her for allegedly posting twerking videos on TikTok while on paid leave of absence due to severe back pain.

The Superior Tribunal of Justice in Spain Castilla y Leon region recently upheld a supermarket’s decision to fire a cashier over a series of TikTok videos that were deemed “incompatible with her ailments”. The woman, referred to only as ‘Mrs. Piedad’ in the court papers, was reportedly an employee of Semark AC Group SA, the company behind the Lupa chain of supermarkets in Spain. She had been with the company since 2006, but at the end of January 2021 she went on an extended paid leave of absence, claiming that she was dealing with serious back problems. Her TikTok account said otherwise, though…

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An Irish financial manager for Ireland’s national railway network claims that he gets paid almost $130,000 (€108,000) a year to eat lunch and read newspapers all day.

Getting paid to essentially do nothing doesn’t sound like something most people would complain about, but for Dermot Alastair Mills, an employee at Irish Rail, it’s discrimination. The financial manager claims that after turning whistleblower about the company’s accounting in 2014, he was gradually relieved of virtually all of his duties, to the point where he now spends most of his days eating lunch and reading newspapers. Despite all this, he still cashes his regular paycheck every month.

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A French court recently ruled that a man fired from a consulting firm for not being fun enough at the workplace has the right to be as boring as he likes.

In 2015, Cubik Partners, a French management consultancy based in Paris, fired Mr. T, whose full name was not disclosed for privacy reasons, arguing that he was difficult to work with, a poor listener, and simply boring. What the company apparently meant, however, was that Mr. T didn’t go out with his colleagues enough after work, as part of the company’s “fun-based” approach to team building. The employee, on the other hand, clarified that he simply refused to forcibly partake in various excesses, such as consuming large quantities of alcohol and even sharing a bed with colleagues afterward.

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A new online “profession” is making news headlines in Brazil. Attractive women will attempt to seduce clients’ husbands and then provide proof of their faithfulness.

Brazilian loyalty inspectors have become very popular on social networks like TikTok and Instagram. They are usually young, attractive women who charge between 20 reals ($4) and 150 reals ($30) to test men’s loyalty to their wives or girlfriends online, and then provide proof to their clients. Testing usually involves sliding into their targets’ DMs, approaching them on WhatsApp or simply pretending to have obtained their contacts from a mutual acquaintance. They take screenshots of conversations with their marks, any photos that they send, and then hand them all to their partners as proof of their loyalty, or lack-there-of.

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The superstitious manager of a Chinese education company has come under fire for rejecting people with ‘5’ as the last digit of their phone number.

Chinese news outlets have been reporting the bizarre case of an education company in Shenzhen, Guangdong that allegedly rejects job applications of people who have ‘5’ as the fifth digit in their phone numbers, because the boss considers it back luck. Such applicants are advised to change their phone numbers if they are truly interested in working at the company. The bizarre condition, which has nothing to do with competencies or work ethics, has sparked a heated online debate in China, where superstition is still a big part of daily life.

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Family Mart, Japan’s second-largest convenience store chain, recently started using AI-powered robots to restock shelves, as a way to deal with the country’s fast-shrinking workforce.

The decline in labor population is one of the biggest threats to businesses operating in Japan, and some have already started looking for ways to replace human workers. Case in point, major convenience store chain Family Mart, a company has recently teamed up with Tokyo-based robotics company Telexistence to introduce AI-powered robots in hundreds of its stores across the country. The new “employees” will be in charge of replenishing drinks in refrigerators and are expected to make human workers’ jobs easier and, in some cases, replace them completely.

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Wang Zhenxi, a young woman from Luoyang, Henan Province, is known as one of China’s premier “mistress persuading teachers”, professionals who convince mistresses to end their affairs with married men.

Extramarital affairs are frowned upon in virtually all cultures around the world, but China is perhaps the only country in the world to have not one, but at least two professions that deal specifically with this type of relationship. One is the “mistress killer,” a type of detective/vigilante that helps scorned wives reveal their husbands’ infidelities and also exact revenge on the mistresses. The other is the “mistress persuading teacher” who relies on more diplomatic techniques to convince mistresses to end their affairs and allow their partners to return to their families. One such persuasion master was recently profiled by a major Chinese newspaper, after it became known that she had once managed to persuade over 800 mistresses in a single year.

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Ashley Peldon is a professional scream artist who spends hours screaming into high-fidelity microphones to record various types of screams for movies and TV shows.

Have you ever wondered how Hollywood stars manage to get online screaming just perfect? It’s not an easy thing to pull off if you think about it, and the reality is that they don’t. Just like stunt people replace most actors for dangerous scenes, scream artists put their vocal cords on the line for scenes that could temporarily or permanently damage the actors’ voices. Ashley Peldon is one such scream artist who can naturally produce a variety of screams that are recorded and used in movies and TV series.

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Taylor A. Humphrey, a 33-year-old woman from New York, works as a professional baby name, charging people thousands of dollars for helping them pick out the perfect names for their offspring.

It’s hard to believe that someone could make a living helping expecting parents select a suitable name for their child, but Taylor A. Humphrey is living proof that it can be done. She has been a full-time baby name for years, charging clients between $1,500 and $10,000 for providing suitable baby names based on a variety of factors. Her services range from a simple phone call and a list of bespoke names based on the answers to a questionnaire, to a $10,000 option that involves genealogical investigations and selecting a name on-brand with the family business.

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A Chinese man who won the praise of his employer by working 12-hour shifts basically 30 days a month recently sparked controversy in his home country.

On February 18, pictures of a framed billboard depicting the “model employee” of a company in Zhengzhou, Henan went viral on Chinese social media, sparking a heated debate. The honorary billboard praises the man, one XueLintao, for working 12-hour days, basically 30 days a month, influencing both new and old employees through his actions, improving the company’s daily production, saving his employer money in labor costs and improving equipment utilization. But most netizens didn’t see Xue as an example, but rather as a “traitor” and as an “accomplice in overtime hell”.

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Liang Xiaoqing is China’s most popular “auntie” fashion model, a niche segment aimed at marketing fashion products to middle-aged and elderly women.

Although Liang Xiaoning is only 29-years-old, you’d probably think she was well in her 40s, maybe even her 50s, if you looked at any of her professional modeling photos. She has been working as an “auntie” model since she was 18, trying her best to look distinguished and elegant, but also a lot older than her real age. Her tall figure and round, pleasant face apparently make her the perfect auntie model, and over the years she has perfected the art of posing and displaying the emotions that appeal most to her target audience.

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A 31-year-old man from the UK works as an “expert waiter” in his spare time, spending hours in long queues on behalf of rich people too busy to do it themselves.

For the last three years, Freddie Beckitt, a historical fiction writer from Fulham, in the United Kingdom, has been supplementing his monthly revenue by working as a professional queuer, waiting in line on behalf of wealthy clients to the tune of £20 ($27) an hour. By virtue of being a Londoner, Beckitt says he has queuing “down to an art” and will easily spend hours standing in line, as long as someone is willing to pay him for it. In fact, he only wishes he could spend more time in queues, so he could turn his service into a full-time job.

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Chinese real-estate agencies are paying so-called “haunted house testers” to spend at least 24 hours in ‘stigmatized’ properties in order to convince potential buyers that they are completely safe.

Real-estate properties where “unnatural deaths” have occurred are really tough to sell, especially in markets where superstition and the belief in supernatural phenomena are strong. Japan, for example, has an agency that specializes in marketing and selling such stigmatized properties, because they don’t really appeal to the mainstream market. China does things a little differently. Apparently, real-estate agencies pay haunted house testers to spend at least one night in problematic homes to prove that they are not haunted.

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