When I was nineteen, I joined the Navy as a recruit. During the first two weeks, we had to do all sorts of exercises before we could be shipped off to our respective service locations.  Among these were physical trials, the last of which was the dreaded 3,000-metre timed run. Being more of a sprinter than a long-distance runner, I hated that one. We had done similar tests in school when I was growing up, and I hated it then, too.

The run actually went pretty well for me, though. I pushed myself hard and felt the taste of blood in my mouth and my whole body aching, but I knew I was doing well. I was hot on the heels of one of my squad mates, who happened to be an elite volleyball player in tremendous shape, so even though he pulled away from me on the finishing stretch, I felt confident that I would score a good time for my run — perhaps even a personal best.

As I crossed the finish line, my body rioted and I ended up in a ditch, vomiting from the sheer exhaustion. I had pushed myself beyond the limit. Still, though. Good time. Should be worth it.

Later that day, back in the barracks, one of the training officers came to find me.

Lieutenant: “[My Name]?”

Me: “Yessir.”

Lieutenant: “I’m afraid I have some bad news. We don’t have a time for your 3,000-m run.”

Me: “What? But I…”

Lieutenant: “It seems the guys responsible for writing down the times missed you. And a few other guys. Since this is a required test, you’ll have to run it again.”

I was gutted. I felt sure I had scored a good time, possibly the fastest I had ever run that distance, and they failed to record it? Man, that smarts. (I’m actually still a bit sore about that, twenty years later, because now I’ll never know how fast I actually managed to run it).

That same evening, I went back out there to do the run again. I was tired, so I wasn’t able to put in the same level of effort this time, but as long as I ran it under a certain time, it would at least be approved. I did the best I could, crossed the finish line exhausted once again, and returned to the barracks for a well-earned night’s sleep.

The following morning, over breakfast, I was once again approached by our lieutenant, who was looking sheepish.

Lieutenant: “[My Name], I’m sorry about this…”

Me: “What is it?”

Lieutenant: “Your second run yesterday?”

Me: “Yes, I did it.”

Lieutenant: “That’s just it. We still don’t have a time recorded.”

Me: “You’re kidding me!”

Lieutenant: “Afraid not.”

Me: “So I have to do it again?! That’s three runs in two days!”

Lieutenant: “I know, I know… Look, I don’t know what to tell you. We’re not going to hold the results against you if you get a weak time; just get through it in less than the fifteen minutes required.”

At this point, I was fuming. How difficult could it be to look at a stopwatch as a runner comes across a finish line? Even if the times were slightly inaccurate due to the manual recording, it can’t be that hard to get SOME kind of result written down? Thinking the guys responsible for this must be absolutely useless at their jobs, I headed back to the barracks to get back into my sneakers and tracksuit.

Once again, I ran that dreaded 3,000-metre track around the base. Once again, I hated it. Once again, I crossed the finish line, feeling like I was going to vomit. This time, though, I had learned my lesson.

Over by the finish line was a guy with a clipboard and a stopwatch. I went over to the guy to make sure he got my time down. It couldn’t be that hard; there were only two runners on the track.

Guy: “What…?”

Me: “Just checking to see that you wrote my time down this time. I’m [My Name].”

Guy: “Oh…”

Me: “Yeah.”

Guy: “…”

He just stood there with a blank look.

Me: “So?”

Guy: “Uh… what…?”

Me: “Write it down!”

Guy: “What?”

Me: “My time! Write it down, there, on that piece of paper!”

Guy: “Uh… oh, yeah…”

Me: “You’re still not writing! That number, on your stopwatch, write it down on that line there.”

It still took him some thirty seconds to finish the simple task of writing down six numbers on his piece of paper. Honestly, I half suspected the guy was either on drugs or just completely useless. I literally had to point to the correct line on his sheet, and I refused to move until I could see that he had actually written down my time next to my name.

In the armed forces, we are sometimes given access to some really dangerous things. Like guns. Good thing this guy was only assigned to handle a stopwatch.

I work at a museum dedicated to the Titanic and its tragic story. A tourist family is going through the exhibits, and the father comes barrelling over to me.

Guest: “So… this huge ship really existed?”

Me: “…yes, sir.”

Guest: “And all this really happened? The iceberg and the sinking?”

Me: “Yes, sir.”

Guest: “Wow! That’s incredible! They should make it into a movie!”

Related:
A Titanic Gap In Their Knowledge Of History

I work for a government department. We have offices and locations all over the state. I’m based out of a city that’s about a two-and-a-bit-hour train ride to our head office.

At the time, I was working on a team that had members working remotely all across the state, looking after policy, process, and quality assurance. Our old manager had gone and gotten himself promoted for being genuinely brilliant at his role. So, our new manager was hired in from the glorious world of banking, and he was here to “whip us lazy public servants into shape”.

A few days after he began his role, [New Manager] called us all to a teleconference to inform us that he wanted all of us to be at the head office at 8:00 am the next morning for an all-day in-person team meeting. He wanted to see us in “meat space” to “size us up”, understand what we were doing, and see where we “weren’t keeping up with the private sector”.

As I mentioned, due to the nature of the work we were doing, we were all across the state. In-person whole-team meetings were rare, and if they occurred at all, they were booked weeks in advance. We were all adept at video-conferencing LONG before the global health crisis.

Some of us tried to tell our new high-flyer manager that almost none of us were in the same city as he was and that being there on such short notice would mean travel expenses, meal allowances, overtime, etc. He didn’t seem to care, and he told us in no uncertain terms to “just be at the head office tomorrow at 8:00 am” before abruptly hanging up.

Now, I should explain something. I’m one of a handful of union delegates in our department. I know our rules back to front, specifically the sections dealing with travel, allowances, and overtime. So, I engaged malicious compliance mode. If [New Manager] wanted us there, fine, but it’d cost him.

I quickly went about emailing my team what [New Manager] had done by requiring us to be in the head office at 8:00 am and what we had to do.

Because we’d have to travel outside of our normal work hours, our workday clock started ticking the moment we left our homes and only stopped once we got home.

Some of our team travelled overnight. They were entitled to overtime to travel, a dinner allowance, and accommodation for the night, and the same for their return home. As someone travelling in the morning before 7:00 am, I was entitled to a breakfast allowance, lunch allowance, and if I got home after 9:00 pm, a dinner allowance also.

I left my house at 5:00 am to catch the only train that would get me there in time. The train was running slightly behind, but I made it in time. So, the first three hours of my workday were down and I’d done no work.

After a brief period of us introducing ourselves to [New Manager], he proceeded to spend the next four hours telling us about all of the things he’d done at the bank, how he’d made so much money for them, where they’d sent him as a holiday bonus, how we were all stuck in the past in the public service, how the work he’d seen wasn’t up to “private sector standards”, etc. He had all the cocksureness of a finance bro who had always failed upward because others had picked up his slack.

By 3:00 pm, my entire team was in overtime pay territory, and [New Manager] was just warming up with his non-charm offensive. Another three hours went by with [New Manager] verbally patting himself on his back, deeply in love with hearing his own voice, but all I heard was, “Cha-ching! Cha-ching!”

[New Manager] decided that 5:00 pm was a good time to finish up. He stopped mid-sentence, looked at his watch, unceremoniously said, “That’s all for today. Go home now,” and walked out.

After I and a few others gave awkward shrugs to each other, we all packed up and started to make our separate ways home after doing no work all day.

I got to the train station pretty quickly and saw that a train was leaving soon that would get me home around 8:00 pm… or I could catch the all-stations train and get home closer to 9:30 pm. You know what? No matter how fast I could run, I just couldn’t catch that earlier train. D***, I’d just have to catch that all-stations train and be on the clock for another hour and a half, plus have my dinner paid for. Such rotten luck!

I submitted my claims the next day: four and half hours at double rate, my train tickets, my taxi fares to and from the train station, and my breakfast, lunch, and dinner allowances. For me alone, it was close to a $500 expense claim. The rest of my team followed suit and ensured that they claimed everything, too.

[New Manager] tried to fight us on approval for the claims, but he quickly learned that, unlike in the world of banking, most public servants are union, and we’d raise living h*** if he denied our guaranteed allowances.

His all-day [New Manager]-fest symposium blew a good $6,000 hole in his budget. Needless to say, while [New Manager] was our manager, he never required us to attend an in-person meeting again — video-conferencing was just fine.

He only lasted six months before “leaving for new opportunities”.

He just went back to his old job at the bank. Guess he was the one who couldn’t keep up.

I work at a bagel shop. About two years ago, the building was occupied by a burger joint. The shop is now heavily decorated with paintings of bagels and breakfast food. A guy walks in.

Customer: “Three doubles and two orders of fries.”

Me: “Sorry, we don’t sell burgers or fries.”

Customer: “What? This is [Burger Place]! Of course, you do!”

Me: “Sir, this is a bagel place. We don’t do burgers.”

Customer: *Looking around for the first time* “Well, you should make it more obvious!”

Me: “We have signs—”

Customer: “Customers don’t read signs!

Me: “Sir, our front door handle is a sesame bagel, and there is a bagel mosaic on the floor.”

Customer: “Well… I… You should sell burgers!” *Storms out*

I have plenty of stories about job interviewers not reading the “handbook” about job interviews, but this one still annoys me even years later. It’s all well and good for experts to throw advice at job candidates regarding how to prepare, act, and even dress for interviews, but if the other side of the equation doesn’t follow the same standards or procedures, then they are wasting your time — and potentially missing out on good staff, too.

The company I worked for at the time was going to be shut down. This left me looking for a new job, and my particular engineering specialty rather limited the range of companies that might employ me. I was invited for an interview with [Company]. It was about 200 miles from where I was living at the time, but it was also a major player in my industry. The interview was scheduled for first thing in the morning, so I drove there the day before, spent the night in a B&B, and then attended the interview the next day.

The interview itself was pretty straightforward. I’d had plenty of interviews before then (even more since), and this one was plain vanilla. They explained how the job was a field support engineering role that included a rolling call-out system where one week in four I would be on-call twenty-four-seven. This was not quite what I was looking for and made me a little uncertain, but I needed a job and couldn’t be too fussy. Then, something happened to push me right over to “You can stick your job where the sun don’t shine” territory.

Most of the interview panel was smartly dressed in shirts and ties, and I personally was wearing a business suit, but there was this one guy in a T-shirt and jeans with a mop of unkempt hair. He didn’t say much for most of the interview; he just slouched there in his chair looking bored. I don’t quite remember what his role was — senior engineer, I think — but he looked and sounded like a stereotypical nerd, and I say that as a professional nerd myself. Unfortunately, he also had a certain attitude, like having to be involved with something as pedestrian as a job interview was somehow beneath him and a waste of his intellect.

In my CV (aka resume), I naturally include the various training courses I had attended and certificates I had achieved, and a couple of those dealt with mobile phone technologies. I hadn’t worked in that area for some years, and this company didn’t use mobile phone technology at all anyway, so I had not revised that particular topic, focusing instead on the technologies that they did use and manufacture. My belief is that including all the things I had done over the years demonstrated a well-rounded experience and how I had been able to adapt and learn new subjects beyond my original degree as required.

We were nearing the end of the interview when this scruffy-looking guy asked a really obscure question about mobile phone tech. I couldn’t remember what the answer was and honestly said so, pointing out that I hadn’t revised that particular subject as it wasn’t relevant to the job spec they had supplied. He responded that I shouldn’t have even put it in my CV if I didn’t expect to be quizzed on the topic, leaning back in his chair with a smug look on his face. Any doubt that I might have had suddenly evaporated, and I knew that I really didn’t want to work in this place.

Now, this guy has no idea how much time and effort I spent working in that area of engineering or how I attained that qualification. As far as I am concerned, I fully earned the right to put that entry onto my CV, and if he wanted to be a complete smart-a**e coming up with a question just to trip me up, then that said far more about him than me.

It also occurred to me that if it had gotten the job, then this clown would probably have been my immediate supervisor. Oh, joy.

With hindsight, I should have given them feedback there and then that if this was the best example of their management and how they treated staff, then they were not really selling the job. But when you’re young and frankly desperate for work, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of anyone.