Elijah Stout (@elijahstout), a Tennessee-based creator who posts often about wealth-building and figuring life out as a young man, says a single message to a new-hire group chat made its way to his area manager days later, in what he frames as a lesson about trusting coworkers.
What happened with this Enterprise group chat?
Stout says he was about a month into a job at Enterprise when the company sent him to a three-day new-hire training in Nashville, roughly a five-hour drive from his branch. The sessions were “classroom style,” and he says he clicked with the other trainees his age.
“We created a group chat,” he recalls—a detail he flags as “an important part of the story.”
He drove home the last night, got in around midnight, and was in bed by 1:30 a.m. At 6:30 a.m., he clocked in to a lot with “20 cars to check in,” in cold rain. Miserable, he says he vented in the group chat: “Respectfully, this job blows.”
According to Stout, everyone laughed.
A Few Moments Later
About a week later, he sat down for a routine one-on-one with his branch and area managers. The area manager, he says, is from his hometown. The conversation started warmly—how’s the move, how’s the transition. He told her he was struggling a little, but OK. As he stood up to leave, he says, she stopped him.
“Would you consider this a professional environment?” he says she asked.
When he said yes, she added—per his account—that in a professional environment, employees should refrain from saying things like “this job blows.”
Stout says he didn’t respond much; he already hated the job enough that being fired wouldn’t have stung. But the real issue is the dry snitching that went on—in a created personal group chat—in what he believed was among co-workers who understood his emotions in the moment.
His takeaway: “Don’t trust anybody at Enterprise. You know what? Don’t trust anybody.”
Former employees share their own experiences
“I could make an entire series on my 12 years there,” said one person. “You are correct. That job BLOWS.”
One person offered him some advice. “Become friends with few [people] there,” they wrote. “Lot of snakes and gossip queens. Nobody can just go to work and put work in for themselves.”
There was a wild story by a former employee: “I managed a single employee branch. Woke up one morning 3 years into the job, drove to the office, put my office keys in the drop box, went home and back to bed. Took my Area Manager 3 days to realize.”
When the Group Chat Isn’t the Group Chat
Casual venting reaching the boss’s ears isn’t new. In July 2021, Netflix fired three senior film marketing executives—about half its staff at that level—after they were caught complaining on Slack about chief marketing officer Bozoma Saint John and other leaders, The Hollywood Reporter first reported. Sources told the outlet the trio thought the channel was private; another employee found “several months’ worth of messages” and reported them.
Two years earlier, The Verge documented six employees fired at luggage startup Away after executives got wind of a private Slack channel where mostly LGBTQ workers and workers of color vented about the job. Reporter Zoe Schiffer wrote that the channel was billed as “a safe space”—until it wasn’t.
@elijahjstout This is a serious offense at Enterprise #enterprise #job #money #career #serious ♬ original sound – elijahjstout
Subplot reached out to Stout (@elijahstout) via TikTok message and comment, and to Enterprise via email.
