I’m a professional chef, and I have been for a few years. In Australia, apprentice chefs are trained in a sort of college where we learn about 150 recipes. Many of the recipes are provided to the students in bulky, finicky booklets that you wouldn’t really want to take anywhere with you, so I started writing some of the recipes in a separate notebook along with some other recipes I’d learned from coworkers or family members. I created a sort of pseudo-cookbook, and I would often bring this book into the kitchen so I would remember ingredient quantities and cooking times. Eventually, I would leave the book in the kitchen pretty much around the clock.

I soon found out that some of the other chefs in the kitchen were using my cookbook to check official recipes for the restaurant we worked for (as typically the head chef would have to tell them and this got annoying for everyone). This restaurant was a part of a popular sports club in the area, so consistency was extremely important to management. Therefore, having a written record of the new recipes or changes to long-time recipes was very important.

As it turned out, management had stopped making changes to the official club recipe book a few months before I even started, so my book had become the de facto official recipe book. For a while, this was no issue to me, and I kept adding new recipes to it throughout the next few years.

However, after my third year working there, I finished my studies and became fully qualified as a chef, so I suddenly became more expensive to keep on as a staff member. Therefore, management started looking for any reason to replace me with a new apprentice.

Eventually, they found someone to replace me and gave a half-a**ed reason for firing me and told me:

Management: “Take all your things and leave. You can no longer offer what we are looking for.”

So, I took everything I owned — including the notebook with all the club’s recipes — and left.

For a few days, not a whole lot happened, but slowly, the club’s reviews started complaining about bland food, dry cakes, inconsistent classic recipes, and every other food-related thing you could think of. At one point, there were fifty negative reviews in a single day. For our town, that was a massive amount in one day. It felt pretty d*** good since I felt they deserved it and left me unemployed on short notice. However, I was quickly offered a new job by a smaller restaurant whose owner knew me from the sports club kitchen.

After about a week, I received multiple calls. I answered one, and it was one of the higher managers from the sports club.

Manager: “Could you return the recipe book? The kitchen needs it back.”

I laughed but replied firmly:

Me: “It’s my book full of my recipes, so it isn’t going anywhere near you. I’ll remind you that you told me I ‘could no longer offer what you were looking for.’”

The manager clearly began to panic; he offered to give me my job back and “just let bygones be bygones”. I already had a new job, so I completely brushed off this offer and ignored him. I hung up pretty soon after that.

I started putting the recipes from my book on the new restaurant’s menu, and it began to attract a few regular customers of the sports club, so I quickly found myself with more and more responsibility and command within the kitchen. It got to the point where about a third of the menu was from my book.

This slow trickle of sports club regulars picked up speed after about three months and led to several high-level managers from the club deciding to visit the restaurant I’d helped build. They basically demanded I give them my cookbook, claiming it would be much more beneficial for the community if they had it. My head chef laughed in their faces and told them to piss off.

It’s been about two years. My head chef and I have a very positive relationship, and the customer base we have at the restaurant is better than ever.

We didn’t take every customer from the big club, but it was enough damage to their profits to scare a few investors away, and it caused a decent bit of damage to one of the higher managers’ reputations. Furthermore, the recipe issues and negative reviews led to the majority of the kitchen quitting. According to one of my old colleagues, they cited the lack of support and organisation from upper management as the final reasons everyone was quitting, and this led to an even larger dip in the quality of the restaurant food.

I also get paid significantly more at this restaurant than I did at the sports club.

I’m flying from Perth to Brisbane. At some point during the flight, while I’m relaxing at my seat, someone leans over me from the aisle to stare out the window. At first, I think it’s one of the stewards, but then I notice the uniform. It’s one of the pilots.

The man stares intensely out of the window next to me and then mutters to himself.

Pilot: “Well, I’ll be d***ed. So it is.”

He stepped away from the window and went back to the front of the plane.

This caused me to freak out a little. Actually, it caused me to freak out a lot. I spent the rest of the flight gripping the headrests and hoping.

We landed, and I made some discreet inquiries of the crew. I learned that the pilot had been returning to the cockpit from using the restroom and noticed a double rainbow out of my window.

Recently, one of my coworkers found out that I don’t drive; I don’t even have a license despite being more than a decade over the legal age. He’s taken to nagging me about getting my license, usually thinking up scenarios where he believes I’d need to be able to drive. I’ve had solutions to each. He still tries, though.

Coworker: “I was watching a video the other day about how to survive nuclear war. It said to ‘drive as far away from the city as possible’. How’d you do that?”

Me: *Shrug* “I have friends.”

Coworker: “And you’re sure that in that emergency they’d think to pick you up?”

Me: *Shrug again* “I mean, you’re possibly massively overestimating my will to live.”

Coworker: *Laughs* “Okay! You’ve got me there.”

I work in the poultry industry. I am out visiting one of our farms, and a few of the shed walkers and I are having lunch up at the farm office.

An elderly man shows up at the gate, wanting to buy eggs. We’re all a little confused because we absolutely cannot sell eggs directly from the farm, but he’s insisting he’s bought eggs from this farm before. One of the shed walkers goes to find the farm manager as the man asks us to make sure all his eggs are double-yolks because that’s what he got last time.

Finally, the farm manager shows up.

Manager: “We can’t sell you eggs. You have to go to [Store #1] or [Store #2] to get eggs.”

Man: “No, no, but I used to buy eggs from here. Maybe five years ago, you used to sell eggs to the public.”

Manager: “Sir, I have worked on this farm for twenty-five years. We have never sold eggs from here. Please leave.”

He did leave, begrudgingly.

Two weeks later, we had almost exactly the same conversation with an elderly woman who argued even harder that she used to buy eggs from the farm. It took nearly fifteen minutes for her to give up and leave.

I recently got a phone call at work that set several red flags flying for me. First, when I answered the phone, there were several seconds of silence before I got anybody on the line. Then came the tell-tale noises of a busy call centre and, finally, a lady with a foreign accent.

She gave her name, but the next part of the call was indecipherable due to a badly glitching line. Hmmm… I caught something about:

Caller: “…as a valued phone and electricity customer, you are eligible for a discount.”

Me: “Okay, that sounds good.”

I was a bit suspicious but, well, the big companies do tend to outsource, so I thought maybe this MIGHT be legit… but then came the final red flag.

Caller: “Can you tell me who your electricity provider is, please?”

Me: “If I’m a ‘valued customer’, you’d already know that. Goodbye!”

Sorry, scammers, but I have work to do!