What's the worst example of not "reading the room" you ever witnesses?

At the tail end of a massive maintenance shutdown (16 hr days for everyone, for 2 weeks) the mill leadership started a site-wide meeting with pictures and stories of their recent trip to Japan. How they went golfing, the great meals they had, their trip to the mountain, etc. They finally wrapped that up and proceeded to tell us that cost of living raises were going to be small that year due to them being “unsure about next year’s profit margins”.
There was a pretty steady wave of resignation letters for the 6 months following that meeting.
- Jesus, some people just have no awareness whatsoever.
  
  It's almost always better for a company to have resignations than layoffs.
  So it's kind of always been a thing for them to "encourage" resignations with shit like this, then hire back new people later for drastically lower salaries.
  It's what a lot of places are doing now mandating return to the office.
  
  Or they don't care because they feel they deserve it and we peons don't.
- Similar thing happened at my first job out of college. It was a year into COVID and we'd been WFH since the spring before this annual June meeting. They had just gotten done announcing that our productivity had exceeded targets, when they added two more announcements:
  WFH was ending, and we'd all have to go back to an office that didn't have enough desks for everyone to be there all at once but that was okay because we could all just coordinate amongst ourselves as to who gets to sit where and when and when we had in person all-hands meetings some people could just sit on the floor and work.
  Due to a lawsuit filed against an entirely different OU we shouldn't expect much in the way of bonuses this year.
  We saw the stress the company was under between the lawsuit and the move, so over the next couple months we helped by cutting about a million dollars a year from their annual salary budget.
  
  some people could just sit on the floor and work.
  i hope you have a workplace safety agency where you are, because damn.....
- It's amazing how often I see executives talking about their cool trip, their new plane, or other rich person bullshit during the same presentation where they are telling their employees to suck up some furlough, reneg on bonus, or similar financial hardship.
- Super mega sons of bitches Super mega.....sons of bitches
  https://youtu.be/1Tklowb-ioY?si=n1d3CHpBKRL18825

I thought I made people mad by ordering a curry chicken sandwich in a student-ran shop in college, but I hadn't paid attention to an announcement that was made at the end of the class and I accidentally interrupted the minute of silence for a terrorist attack that had happened a few days before
- Good lord 😂
  
  I got called "chicken curry" for years
- I remember a pause for a minute's silence announced in the upper concourse of a train station (UK) last year. It was disconcertingly comedic as the people walking in either on the phone or with a friend were very confused at why everyone inside was standing motionless and glaring at them.
  
  I think I was working in that station on that day, because I have a very similar anecdote. Actually someone came to buy a ticket, and was annoyed because they thought they might miss their train having to wait for the minute's silence to end. Not even the most callous passenger I've come across either.
- Honestly fuck those intercom announcements. If you want to have a minute of silence, say "we will now have a minute of silence" instead of "mrrrr mrr mrrr mr drrrrr mrrrrr mrrrrr-mrrrrrrrr" fucking shit quality can't understand a word they say
  
  It was an announcement in class by the teachers
- Similar situation, I was at an antiques shop with my parents, on November 11th, which here in the UK is a day of remembrance for people who died during WW1 and WW2. We're observing the moment of silence, when an American guy walks in, notices the silence and loudly exclaims "Wow, who died? It's like a mausoleum in here!" Someone, thankfully, took him to the side and quietly explained what was happening. He did apologise afterwards. I found the whole situation very funny.
  
  At least there's a concrete answer to his question!
- Ooooof. This sounds like something I would do. Ugh. I want to hide right now just thinking about it. Glad you made it through to the other side. :)

Went to a cousin's wedding, her parents split when she was little so I'd not seen my Uncle Mal for decades. Tbh everyone was expecting him not to show because he's a selfish twat and knows nobody likes him.
Surprise, Mal is here. He had an inexplicably-attractive, younger date (Mal was a disgusting, horrid-breathed, lumpy old man and his date was a pretty, well-spoken woman in her 30s so we all assumed she was an escort, as Mal has no redeeming qualities).
The whole time everyone is desperately avoiding being stuck alone with him, and everyone is talking about having the same conversation... Mal has written a book, he's a writer now, and he's written a poem he wants to read.
He was given many hints, subtle and not-so-subtle that his poem wasn't wanted and he agreed not to read it. Unfortunately whether due to ego or wine, he loudly interrupted someone elses toast to announce he had a poem to read. Our collective hearts sank.
It was worse than we expected, at one point including cringe-inducing references to his daughter having large breasts. It went on and on for at least 5 minutes of everyone silently looking at the floor, sneaking the occasional "No way he just said that?!" glances at each other. He eventually finished, and just stood there awkwardly for about 10 secs, I assume waiting for applause, which obviously was not forthcoming.
Read the fucking room Mal, no-one wants to hear your shitty poem and no-one cares that you're (allegedly) a published writer now. And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
- That sounds horrible but in good news this was probably the funniest story I've heard on Lemmy so far
  
  The last sentence I will admit is a shameless ripoff of a line from It's Always Sunny, rest is my writing so I'm glad you enjoyed it. At least some good came from suffering his presence!
- And your breath smells like a fart pushed through an onion.
  My sides
  
  Honesty compels me to inform you that this ending sentence was shamelessly stolen from It's Always Sunny. Highly recommend it, first season is a bit ropey as they are literally filming, writing, scripting themselves with no experience and at the start of their acting careers. An incredible show though imo!
- I swear this feels like a plot point from a Righteous Gemstones episode. Sounds like you have a real life Uncle Baby Billy
  
  I've been meaning to watch this show but I was put off by the evangelical-ness of it... worth watching then? This happened in the UK about 8 yrs ago!
- "Read the fucking room Mal" deserves to become a thing.
  
  If I ever see an unkind comment and someone replies with "Read the fucking room Mal" I think I'd lose my shit with delight
- I could just hear the tone in your voice when reading this. Great storytelling.

My first job out of university.
Company is going through financial hardship. Boss cancels our collective insurance without telling us. Then the president of the company does a meeting in a shady motel reception room to announce to everyone the company isn't going well and we all need to take a 10% pay cut. Ends the PowerPoint presentation with a photo from our major client's ads with a lady on a beach with a laptop. President says "oh that's going to be me in a few weeks. I'll be going to Greece!"
The whole room just say there silent.
- Fuck the rich.

"Don't you all have phones!?"
- I was an interpreter for this event, and I was the one covering this part of the panel. As an ex-Blizz fan, this moment is seared in my memory for many reasons. The shame of having to interpret this not the least.
  
  Yup, I was there as well. The bride moment of dead silence followed by booing after they announced it will forever be etched into my brain. To be fair though, poor Wyatt was set up and was never going to land that pitch in that setting.
  
  ?
- Thing is, the guy wasn't wrong. Everyone in that room most certainly had a phone capable of playing the game.
  But Blizzard was teasing Diablo 4 all but without actually saying it. I feel that a simple black screen, a voice over, and a flaming "IV" would have been all that was needed since they obviously was balls deep in development of it at the time.
  And Blizzcon is a PC gaming centric event and we all know how PC gamers feel about mobile games. He didn't just read the room wrong, he was in the wrong room entirely. The mobile game should have been announced as a Twitter post
  In comparison Bethesda was smart about announcing Fallout Shelter by talking about Fallout 4 first, then going "oh btw some of us been doing this phone game on the side.."
  
  Plus it was developed by a shitty mobile game apps company that was known for ripping off assets from other games. Sure, Blizzard licensed the assets to them, but the problem wasn't really the stealing of the assets itself, it was that only shitty fly by the night companies are ripping off assets to put into a game that hopes to trick people into spending money on microtransactions before they realize how bad the game was.
- I was going to mention this one.

Former CEO gathers 20-30 of us in the board room, talks about the difficult economy, proceeds to fire everyone.
The silence was deafening.
The meeting ends, he stands at the door expecting us to shake his hand as we leave.
Not a single person shook his hand.
- At least he didn’t publicly share what his bonus was going to be for improving the bottom line.
  
  Never forget that the year Lehman Brothers "collapsed" it paid the CEO 700 million dollars for one years worth of work.
- Back in the day I worked in a restaurant that closed down, and the owner tried to steal all of our last two weeks' pay.
  It had been announced ahead of time that the place was going to close at the end of the month, and we were actually a very popular place, so the last two weeks were completely sold out, crazy busy, and there should have been lots of tips. After we closed, they kept dragging out the date we could get out last paychecks, then finally just tried saying, "there won't be any last paychecks."
  All of us employees got together with a lawyer and they sent a letter saying that they needed to give us our last paychecks or we would file a class action lawsuit for all the tips they'd been stealing out of the tip pool. He then relented and agreed to pay us our last checks, but refused to mail them. When I went to pick up the check, dude really had the balls to try to shake my hand and say, "Hey Turtle Joe, how's the summer going? Take any vacations or anything?"
  I left him hanging and said, "No I've been out of work for months now. I'm not here to talk to you, I just need my check."
  P.S. we sued him for wage theft anyway and ended up taking him for almost $200k.
- Former, you say?
  
  Yeah, a real incompetent sociopath.

Not a specifically bad instance, but everywhere I’ve worked has always had that guy who has a hundred irrelevant questions at the end of a meeting, holding up 10 or so people from actually getting on with work.
- After a couple of bad questions, I'll either excuse myself, suggest we carry on separately, or (ideally) ask to be sent a list, for me to ignore at my leisure.
  Sorry Greg, we're not here to answer your dumbass questions, or indulge your hypothetical edge cases.
  
  It’s always hypothetical rabbit holes 🙄
  They think they’re like Doctor Strange trying to map out every conceivable future
- If 1 person has a question, then chances are good most people have that same question but are too afraid to ask it in front of everyone.
  
  Some people have questions because they just don't listen when information is given, or have no ability to think for themselves.
- Training classes in the military was the bane of my existence when I was in. Always people asking the dumbest questions ever.
- I sit in business requirements meetings for enhancements to some software we use at work, and there’s a guy who feels the need to repeat everything everyone says in his own words (at least twice as many). The meetings used to be 30 mins but they had to extend them to an hour. And we have 2 a week.
  Thanks to WFH it means I have 2 hours a week of guaranteed PlayStation time though, so I shouldn’t complain.
- I'm the guy that needs to understand shit to move forward, so it's like 25% dumb questions, 25% insightful questions, 25% pretentious sounding questions and 25% jokes that give white collar people heart attacks.
  
  Don't you think most people need to understand shit to move on? If you just ask urgent questions, then take time to digest the meeting and ask those insightful followups in a team chat, it filters out the 75% of the crap you were going to say.
  Having a reputation as the guy who prolongs meetings with 25% dumb questions and 25% jokes is not a good thing.
- Yep. That woman in the case where I work. And you can't roll your eyes in a meeting, even a Zoom meeting.
  
  But Zoom meetings mean I can - and do - get to message coworkers and shit talk the offender while it's happening.
  Pro tip: Make it a common practice after doing this to always make sure the last message sent at least starts with something innocuous in case you need to share your screen later so the preview in Teams shows doesn't say "Jesus Christ, Carla is such a..."
- Great question Robert. Let's go ahead and parking lot that for the right time. Make sure you send that to us in your reply to the meeting notes. I don't want to lose track of it.
  
  We'll circle back to that.

I heard this years later by my former boss. He used to work for a company that just announced some lay-offs because work was slow. Right as the lay-offs were being announced the head of the company pulled into the lot with his new Porsche lease. It was terrible timing, but the corporate lease was up and the car was ordered months prior. Just made the owner look especially tone-deaf since the car came the same say as the lay-off announcement.
- that reminds me of a meeting I was in with the CEO of the company I worked for and we went around the room sharing our hobbies. Everyone said things like reading books or baking or playing video games or whatever.
  The CEO said collecting vintage cars.
  
  The CEO said collecting vintage cars.
  I know people aren't going to believe this, but honestly, you don't need to be a bazillionaire to collect vintage cars. It sure helps (a lot!!), but depending upon what he was collecting, you can buy certain classics for (relatively speaking) cheap.
  The director at my old company was into classic cars too and we would shoot-the-shit all the time about his cars and mine.
- Why are most of the stories here about dickhead executives
  
  The janitor doesn't usually have to address an entire room full of people.
  I know hating on CEOs is par for the course for Lemmy, and I tend to agree most of the time, but being fair here, it isn't that often that lower (or even middle) ranking employees have a chance to speak to 10, 20 or 100+ coworkers at the same time.
  
  A lot of the stories are fake, but also a lot of execs are dickheads
  
  Dickhead executives are exactly the sort of people to get in a large room of people forced to be in it, and explicitly not care about "reading the room", therefore the most likely to be in the situation, with the largest forced audiences to go talk about it.

New hire, brought on board comes to a Monday meeting.
The company Quality of Worklife Balance survey has been returned, and it's awful. It's just after the 2008 crash, and we're barely treading water, but the company held on. The CIO brought everyone into the largest conference room, meant for hundreds (there's a couple dozen of us standing around, the chairs weren't setup) and we stand around her as she procedes to tell us "Why is your QWL so low, you should be talking to your managers about this! I don't wanna see another QWL survey this bad ever!" In a very yelly tone.
One of the managers raised their hand, and asked, "Folks feel like they're not being listened to and that they're not getting enough leeway to make decisions."
CIO: "Well they need to get over that."
And that was the first meeting a bunch of developers and IT folks got to see at that company.
Many other shenanigans occurred there, but my personal favorite was the quarter million dollar genset system all setup and tested multiple times -- fueled and ready to go, failed in a major power outage because someone left the key in the "test" position on the generator.
-- That CIO thought they led people, they did nothing of the sort.
- The first all hands meeting (within three days of being hired) I had at my new job was the CEO talking about legal allegations and indicating he's going to be much less involved in the day-to-day. Apparently he was pretty well known for being a massive dick and berating employees.
  On the bright side, I've not had to deal with him once! In the last year-plus I've seen him comment on two tickets regarding bugs, but that's about it. We've not had a single all-hands since then. I just started at an unlucky time, haha

Celebrities singing Imagine
- I completely forgot this happened. 😂 Wow, that was wild.
  
  A bunch of insulated aristocrats starved for attention while the rest of us were getting sick, disabled, and dying.
  
  Our brains suppress extreme cringe memories.

Plant manager sending out a site wide email saying that we're doing awesome, and we're desperately hiring so refer all your friends. One month after layoffs were announced, and those to be layed off still had a month to go.
- I don't know where you're from, but some countries/areas have laws against fire and rehire, it's a disgusting practice.
  
  Give you one guess..... you won't need it.
  
  seen it happen before but what they do is 'abolish' the role, and introduce a new role with a new name, oddly similar job description (they change it enough to count as a new role) and rehire people on contract where the previous roles were permanent

As an autistic person with ADHD I am going to leave this one alone. 😬
- As an ADHD person I have so many stories.
  But I can't remember a goddamn one of them.
- Lady at work told our office one day at lunch that her chihuahua died because it poked its head thru the fence and the neighbours rottweiler bit its head clean off. I could not stop laughing for the rest of the day. Even now its hard not to laugh. I know Im disgusting for thinking it funny, I love animals and would never hurt one, but it was the way she said it, "clean off, i went to take him away from the fence and his collar fell off, his head was completely gone. Neighbours dog at it."
  
  I know in real life it must have been gory and tragic, and I would normally never laugh about someone losing a pet, but the first mental image that comes to mind for me is cartoony and ridiculous so I'm with you on this one
  
  Something about that story loops around from horrible into laughter. Its just so horrible the brain's error handling is like "I dunno try laughing about it"
  
  No, that’s funny. You were right
  
  Holy shit haha!
  I don’t know the specifics and I love animals as well, but I think as a porcelain rat dog™️ owner with a rottweiler neighbour, you should anticipate some risk and act accordingly. Big dogs killing the shit out of rat sized dogs by little more than a growl is very common after all.
  
  You know what they say: it's how you tell em.
  
  I just read that as a chihuahua walked into the cafe :0
- Joke way to tell people, "As an autistic/ADHD person, if you want me to be able to read the room you better write it down. Preferably with bold text an bright colors."
- Lol same. Just me all the time...

I worked a night shift at a lobby of some residential building, with another guy patrolling the building.
Some mentally unstable person wound up sitting at the lobby while the guy was on patrol (long story), so I sent him a message explaining the situation as I didn’t want to talk about it in front of the person.
The patrol guy comes back, looks at the person, looks at me and says “so, who’s the psycho?”
- Good lord, what an inconsiderate asshole

We had a big mandatory meeting where an executive came in to tell us all to be happy we weren't getting our bonuses or pay raises, and used a weird analogy about poor people being perfectly happy, because they have realistic expectations and that's all you need to be happy.
He then had to leave early, as he quipped he was sharing a ride with a fellow executive on the private jet, and if he didn't leave right then, he'd have to suffer flying commercial.
- If you’re still there, organise your workplace. Unionise. Join the IWW - they can help you to accomplish this.
  
  This was like a decade ago, I'm elsewhere now. Still not union, but I personally have no room to complain (reasonable hours and conditions and quite well paid).
- Please tell me someone recorded this utter waste of oxygen doing the equivalent of stepping on garden tools in a Looney Tunes short. That's so monstrously fucking stupid it could be funny (if the old adage of tragedy + time = comedy holds true, anyways).
  
  It's funny when summarized, but sitting there for over an hour to set up the punchline drained all enjoyment from life.
  If someone bothered to record it, I've no idea. Nowadays (different company) all such meetings are recorded and made available, but haven't seen an executive say something quite so boneheaded in general.

"Don't you guys have phones?"
Biggest physical room I've witnessed a misread happen in
- "Is this some out of season April fools joke?"
  
  And yet after everything that happened with Diablo Immortal, Diablo 4 was apparently Blizzard's best selling game ever.
  If the customers don't care why should the company?
- Thousands of people from all over the world. Primarily PC gamers. Paying thousands in flights and accommodation. All to see a predatory phone game get revealed.
  Should have saved that shit for the quarterly shareholder report.
- There it is.
- I came to this thread to say this one too.

Had a teacher tell some students that it's rude to speak a foreign language in school (an international school)
- I had to be this teacher to a bunch of 8 year old Chinese girls who only spoke Mandarin purposefully to ostracize Brazilian girl, the only non Chinese girl in the room.
  It was an English speaking international school in mainland China that incouraged speaking primarily in English.

Unity - "hold my beer"
- This was the main example I had in my head when making this post.

An American comedian, following a long set here in Australia, told the audience to stand up and stretch. He then tried to direct us to "bend over and pat your neighbour on the fanny". Stone cold silence did not indicate to him his mistake, and he tried several times before eventually realising he had lost his audience goodwill entirely with this starting skit.
Turned out later that he had no clue what "fanny" means here, and had to have it explained to him.
- Still a weird thing to say.
  
  Not as weird or rude as telling them to pat their neighbour on the vulva.
- Genuinely curious what does fanny mean in Australia
  
  It's slang for 'pussy'. It's the same in the UK.
  
  Wait, what does fanny mean in America?
  
  Vulva
- Okay wait, even if he meant "butt", I feel like no one is going to follow a random comedian's request to grope your neighbor on the butt...
  
  No, not grope, as I said, pat.
  He felt we had all been sitting down for too long, and should gently pat the stranger on the butt, presumably to help them with the pins and needles. It was weird, but we thought it was weirder still! I believe people did indeed ask a lot of questions of him, but at the time it was a massive moment of lost in translation and divided by a common language, etc.

went to an international boarding school that had a very diverse spectrum of political beliefs
I was in the school's pride club, and my senior year this very charismatic kid, Ken, joined. Ken was an international student
we start our first meeting, and Ken is a vibrant member of the group. but he's saying some very... odd things. he's talking about how gay people are mentally ill and need to be helped, lotsa fun stuff
the club leader very patiently pushes back on him on this, and eventually asks "well it's not like any gay people are here now, right?"
... he didn't come back after that meeting
- He must have thought it was a nationalist pride group.

One time the company big boss did a speech telling us how we could all learn a thing or two from his protégé, and clapped him on the shoulder.
If big boss had spent more time in the office, he'd have known that Mr Protégé spent most of his working hours playing ping-pong with Big Boss's trophy-wife.
- So ping-pong is an euphemism for sex? Or was he literally playing ping-pong?
  
  I just remembered the pattycake scene in Roger Rabbit.
  
  Yeah, but with his balls
- You could argue that he wasn't wrong.

Working in a European country, went to someone's leaving party, to celebrate their career after 35+ years in the job. The manager is new, and flies in for the event specially. The whole room is speaking in their local language, the person's whole extended family is there.
The manager gets up and starts to make a speech, using a lot of English idioms. The speech started out with "35 years?! You get less for murder!". As a native English speaker, I thought that was actually pretty funny. The guys entire family - not so much.
- Honestly, I don't think this one is necessarily bad. In fact this is relatively light compared to the others here.
  I mean... He meant to tell a joke, a good one for those who understand.
  Not sure if he was meant to give speech, tho
- That's a cracker. Going to remember that one

I worked at Cabela's when it was bought out by Bass Pro. The sale went into effect mid-September, and in October they announced that all Cabela's locations would be open on Thanksgiving for the first time ever and that ALL employees were required to be at work
On Thanksgiving day, when the employees who had their family time stripped away last minute were on the edge of revolt, the billionaire owner of Bass Pro made us print out and distribute an email he sent to all managers.
It was pictures of him and his family enjoying their Thanksgiving at his estate and a letter from him expressing how important it was to share the day with family and friends.
- That's so disgusting, I'm sorry you had to put up with that shithead
- Please tell me there was a mass resignation after that email was sent.
  
  The employees weren't volunteers. They still had bills to pay.
  And that's why billionaires are bad. In the case of Bass Pro (probably owned by one person), one man directly controls the lives of tens of thousands of employees and there's no recourse. He buys competing companies and crushes more lives, and makes people watch videos of his fishing trips.
  And he literally thinks people love him for it. He sees himself as a benevolent provider.

Jake the Snake saying that he knows a joke he shouldn't tell, the entire audience being like "don't tell it," and he told it anyway and lost the whole audience who was with him up to that point. It was the racist/xenophobic one about dropping silverware down the stairs to name your kids. There were a few Chinese people in the audience.
- As an Asian person, there's not much I hate more than jokes about Asian names or accents. Not even because it's racist and offensive, but it's just so cheap and hacky. On the other hand, when someone laughs at those jokes, I know that's a person I want nothing to do with ever.
  
  I love a good offensive joke as much as the next guy, but it’s mostly the same ignorant old cheap shots when it comes to racist jokes. Hurr durr I know the bike thief was black because he left watermelon and fried chicken on the ground. Ok grampa time for your walk.
  
  Yep. I feel like a good joke needs a bit more effort than just saying "chin chong". Like, it is a foreign language that has developed in a completely different part of the world, of course it will sound weird to you!

Me. 19. In Ireland for a 2 hour layover to move onto Germany. I realize I can drink here. I go to the bar in the airport.
"What can I get you?"
"Can I get an Irish Car Bomb?"
Yeah... they didn't like that. I didn't know anything about the terrorism shit! 😩
- I'm Irish and worked as a barman for over 10 years. I don't know what happened to cause an issue with you but neither myself or any other bartender I worked with ever gave a shit about someone ordering a carbomb. We just made them and judged you for ordering a terrible drink
  
  When you say you’re Irish, do you mean you were born and raised in Ireland?
- Yeah I'm from Chicago and have Irish relatives, including an authentic McCraken (look it up). You ask for a Black & Tan over in the old country.
  
  I looked up authentic McCracken and nothing comes up apart from a couple linkedin profiles and baseball player Quinton McCracken. What did you mean by that?

Just yesterday we were at my wife's sister's house. They live in a brand-new house in a brand-new neighborhood. Some dingus was going around to every single house leaving flyers advertising a tree trimming service and reminding everyone that it's hurricane season. The thing is, their wasn't a single tree in the entire neighborhood that was bigger than a year-old sapling.
- I recently got warned that someone was offering tree trimming services in my neighbourhood as a way to see which houses were worth stealing from.
  
  Sure, but that scam still wouldn't work in a neighborhood where nobody needs to call them.
- Man, I hope that was just some dude that got paid to pass out fliers.

Boss gets fired for blowing $15M on cloud platform per year for several years. New boss comes in and demands an audit. Turns out there's waste everywhere. New boss says reduce cost or else. New boss calls a meeting a month later to review cost savings plan. Platform owner proceeds to provide a presentation outlining how the platform costs will rise by 20% next year and at least 10% every year after for several years. Platform owner gets fired. Complains no one listens to him.

billionaires being extremely bold currently.
This is a wendys.
- I thought that, too, but it turns out they have nothing to worry about. I think putting smartphones in everyone's face bought them a hundred years.
  
  I think the opposite. I think they're the only reason why everyone isn't in the neoliberal cope cage of the past fifty years.

CEO decided to lay off a huge portion of the company. Then he had the nerve to have an all-hands saying that the company's financials were great and that they were on track to make $X billion in revenue in some years. Most off the laid off people were still in the fucking call.
- My employer told us all the rumours were true. Layoffs were happening. They called it "difficult conversations" instead of firings.
  About 1/5th of a team of 1000 people.
  Apparently they hadn't decided who yet.
  Meanwhile we just received the biggest bonus in the companies history due to historic profits.
  Then the CEO told investors that they expect a big pickup early next year and will need to hire a bunch of people to handle the demand.
  So they are firing a bunch of people for 6 months to hit financial targets in the back half of the year before hiring people again.
  Everyone that is to be fired is still waiting to find out who will be axed.

I'm a physical therapist. I started as a physical therapist assistant. Way back in PTA school, our instructors brought in three people with spinal cord injuries for us to learn from. They talked about their experiences, showed us how they transfer, and one showed us his modified pickup truck that had hand controls and a crane to put his wheelchair in the back.
One of our classmates named Nancy had a habit of putting her foot in her mouth. She had absolutely zero filter. Our class guests were taking questions and one person asked about dating, in a respectful manner. Hearing about challenges related to normal stuff like that helps us to answer questions if we have a patient with a new spinal cord injury. One of the people said they had been with their gf for a few months and was talking about how they chose date activities and stuff. Pretty innocuous, nothing super personal.
Nancy makes a joke along the lines of "I'm surprised anyone would want to date someone like you," kind of chuckling as she said it. The guest speakers seemed to take it in stride but man everyone in the class was looking around clearly horrified.

I guess it depends on what someone means by "reading the room". I've been given the impression people expect the room to read the same universally, as if there was anything inherently perceivable about the situation. It's not for a lack of trying, but I'm always graded low on that skill, often by the same people who think I phrase something as being hostile just because of my wording when I never imply that. If I feel a certain way, I say so, and I don't dishonor people because they're not in the mood to feel the mood I feel.
That said, me walking around a flock of five dozen geese at a park and getting attacked by all of them because I didn't understand they hated my presence takes the cake.
- often by the same people who think I phrase something as being hostile just because of my wording when I never imply that.
  I get what you're saying here. I've been told in the past that I'm always angry and I know I sometimes speak with a condescending tone when I don't mean to. I get frustrated with people not taking a second to think about what they say a lot. Especially when they ask questions, a lot of times if they think for a second they should be able to reason the answer themselves. But I know I have a problem with tone and communication and it's something I've been working on myself for years through therapy and conditioning and I've gotten a lot better.
- If I feel a certain way, I say so
  Well there's your problem right there
  
  How is that a bad thing? I thought clear communication was good.
- I mean... you know that your tone implies your feelings, right?
  
  Kind of. I know it does to other people, but I don't always feel or see the tone change they say they see. There are times there aren't even changes and people still say they perceive something. I wonder if it's a cultural thing, even if only partially, as I am not the same culturally as most others I see.
  
  I'm not the other user, but I can firmly say mine doesn't. People sometimes think I'm arguing with them when I'm actually agreeing with them because I speak with a bit of a monotone. It takes constant conscious effort not to do and makes me feel burned out and dishonest when I try. Apparently it's an autistic trait and is far from the only reason I suspect I'm autistic.

For months at one place I worked senior developers and even junior managers had been haranguing the higher-ups with an alarm bell on how important the Internet was going to be and how we needed to start pivoting toward outfitting our product with the ability to interact properly on the Internet. We were steadfastly ignored and our concerns were quietly scoffed at because our product was a "best of breed" product in our space.
Then we got hit by a huge wave of lost sales because we had no viable scheme in place to proper interact with Internet-based applications.
The then-CEO called a "developers all-hands" meeting in which he pranced around on the stage at the front of the auditorium to complain to us that nobody had been telling him how important this Internet thing was going to be and that we were supposed to be keeping an eye on the leading edge of technology so he can make plans for these things.
This sparked a VERY LOUD outcry as about 150 software developers who'd been ignored and scoffed at for months just flipped a switch into revolution mode. Lots of people started talking loudly (then shouting). One guy with a laptop connected it to the big projector display and started scrolling through an email folder where he'd collected the notices warning about the importance of the Internet and management's (including the CEO's) condescending replies. By the end of that little skirmish the CEO was making a lame excuse that he was "joking" and was "taking our feedback very seriously" after 20 people (half of them very senior) just flatly quit in front of him and walked out of the auditorium.
That's probably the worst "read the fucking room, dude!" moment I ever saw.

Probably this guy on the TV programme Take Me Out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzyvLf0V3qs

Fyre Fest 2. Yes it's a thing. They claim tickets sold out, but I don't believe it for a second.

Was doing my masters degree. We're all talking about some book several people had read. We ask one guy if he's read it and he says "I don't like... read books" with the emphasis on those last two words just dripping with condescension. Like read the statement with the subtext of "if I caught my kid reading a book I'd disown him and call him a queer".
Really inexplicable take in a room full of literally only masters students

In my old job, we were invited to an ultra-important Zoom call that was mandatory for everybody based in head office to attend. The meeting was scheduled at 9:30AM on a Monday morning, in the midst of our busiest week of the month when we had time-critical payment runs to get out for approval by 12PM. Hundreds were pulled from their work.
What was this ultra-important Zoom meeting about?
Our chief financial officer was announcing his resignation. I think everybody on that call would have rather gone back to their work than hear him brag about his plans to comfortably retire and "never work a day beyond 55" for twenty minutes. It was the most tone-deaf and patronizing announcement I've ever heard, especially in a workplace largely staffed by people who were struggling to even make ends meet.
Even my (then) line manager was like "Was that it?"

Not a personal experience, but this room was pretty poorly read:
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/09/12/berkeley-eviction-moratorium-landlords-plan-party

Im noticing a certain..work related theme here in the comments

"I like popcorn"

Yeah it's even worse that he was doing it at an event that's very focused on being inclusive and accepting of everyone. It shouldn't even be a situation where you need to read the room. It should be a given.

My mom was grieving her brother's loss, one of her nephews came in to the room to play on the PS2. She was visibly crying on her bed, but they didn't care. He got to the start menu till I slapped him in the face, and shut off the game. Stupid little shit
- This comment fits the question but not in the way you expected.
  
  Haha just what I thought
- She was crying. He was dissociating. You were lashing out. Grief is terrible.
- I don't know his age, but don't hit kids. There's a better way to handle it.
  
  yeah don't hit kids in the face. Face hits are to visible. Go for the torso instead. /s
- Some people need a slap
  
  Ok
- If you can't communicate with children in other ways than by using violence, then maybe you shouldn't be around kids at all.