When I was in my twenties, my father owned a Porsche 911, and I was on his insurance to allow me to drive it occasionally. I was also an active cyclist, and for journeys of less than ten miles, I preferred to cycle.

While heading down to the local store on my bike, a man driving a convertible BMW pulled out of a side street right in front of me, forcing me to brake hard. I remonstrated with him, to which he spat out the following nugget.

Man: “Oh, go away. I bet you can’t even drive, let alone own a car, and certainly not one as nice as mine. On a bike! I bet you don’t even have a job. Just [redacted] off.”

It just so happened that I had my father’s 911 for the weekend, as I had to drive down to London later that day. When returning from the store, I saw the same man parked outside a property, pontificating, bragging about his BMW.

I went home, got changed, and headed out in the 911. He was still there. I pulled up alongside him.

Me: “Oi, dude, remember me? This is my car. Nice, isn’t it? Very fast, too. I bet you wish you could afford one. Maybe work harder, you know?”

His lower jaw dropped a little.

Me: “Anyway, can’t stop to chat; I gotta get to London. See ya. Oh, and you might wanna grow up a little.”

I let the 911 pull a little wheelspin and rolled away.

I am going to travel by coach, and because I’m mobility impaired, I reserve a seat at the front of the coach. I get to the coach station and, to my chagrin, someone is sitting in my seat. It’s visible from outside the coach, as it’s a window seat. I explain this to the driver, and he goes up to the passenger and asks him to move. Mind you, there is a big paper with RESERVED on the chair, so it’s not as if it’s not obvious.

I go up the stairs and drag my luggage to the seat. Immediately, the passenger pipes up.

Passenger: “That seat is reserved.”

I move the paper and sit down.

Passenger: “That seat is reserved; you have to move.”

Me: “Yes, I know. It is reserved for me.”

Passenger: “Oh…”

Honestly, what did you expect? Not everyone is as blind as you, sir.

This happened several years ago just after I got married. My wife and I both owned property, so I rented out my apartment and we lived in my wife’s little house in her hometown while we prepared to sell it. This is a typical old Northern English industrial town, now really just a suburb of the much bigger city a few miles away, but for some reason, there is an overseas branch of a certain USA-based church there. We would often see these smartly-dressed young Americans walking around with name badges on. They were certainly polite, but we didn’t really have much interaction with them.

One afternoon, I was driving home after an early shift at work, and as I approached our house, I drove past a couple of these young men with their name badges, but I didn’t think anything of it. I carefully started a three-point turn in the rather narrow road so I could park. I was halfway through this process, perpendicular to the kerb, looking over my left shoulder through the back window, when there was a frantic banging on the driver’s window on my right-hand side. 

I slammed on my brakes and turned to my window to see one of these young men in a tie mere inches from my previously moving car. I immediately panicked, thinking I might have hit something — perhaps a cat, or even worse, a child I hadn’t seen! I wound my window down to hear what he had to say.

Man: “Good afternoon, sir! Have you thought about taking God into your life?”

It took me a couple of seconds for me to get my head around the fact that this lad had run right up to and stopped two tonnes of moving car, in the middle of a delicate manoeuvre, just to ask that question. If he had waited another thirty seconds, I would have been parked up. Maybe he thought I had come down this cul-de-sac accidentally and was turning around to drive away, and he couldn’t afford to miss the opportunity? I guess I’ll never know.

When I managed to pick my jaw up off the steering wheel, I could only think of one response.

Me: “I’m sure the good Lord appreciates your enthusiasm, lad, but do you really think he would want you to put yourself in harm’s way just to ask that question?!”

He blinked at me a couple of times and then simply said good-day and walked off with his friend.

If the point of sending these young people all the way to a foreign country was to make them a bit more worldly-wise, then I really hope this lad learned something useful that day; there might be a time and place in your life to run toward danger, but that really wasn’t it.

This is just one of many, MANY stories I can share about a manager I once worked under, who I will call “Trevor”. I worked as an engineer in a broadcast facility. We would often need to do upgrades to one important system or another, and some of these, such as main power, were handled by third-party specialist contractors. They provided a combined Risk Assessment – Method Statement (RAMS) document that any relevant stakeholder in the company (basically any manager whose team could be affected) had to read and give the thumbs up to before the job could proceed.

One such job was scheduled for a Friday night, and muggins here was the late shift that day. The first I heard about it was when the manager of the control room stopped by to ask if I was up to speed with the event, even though I was on a completely different team. I had to matter-of-factly tell him that my own manager hadn’t even mentioned this job to me, let alone asked if I was okay with it.

Normally, I would finish a Friday late shift at 10:00 pm, but this maintenance job wouldn’t even start until 11:00 pm, and it would go on until at least three or four in the morning. So, not only would I lose what was left of my Friday evening, but I would be losing my Saturday morning, as well. Great when you’ve got a young family at home!

I went up to my manager’s desk in the middle of the open-plan office — two floors above the engineering team he was supposed to be running — and asked him about this upcoming overnight work. How come he hadn’t asked me about it? Didn’t he think that he should have at least let me know?

Well, Trevor didn’t like being spoken to like this by a mere mortal such as me, and certainly not in earshot of all the other managers he liked to try and impress. I got dragged into an empty meeting room where he tried to rant at me some more. The only argument he seemed to have, which he repeated over and over again, was that at some point there had been an email, and in that email was an attachment containing the Risk Assessment, and at the bottom of the last page of this Risk Assessment under the heading “Resources” was my name. So, basically, his logic was that I needed to read every line in every document in every email that landed in our shared inbox, just in case my name was in there somewhere. And if my name was there, I had to assume that my work pattern had automatically changed, and he didn’t need to do anything more because it was all my responsibility — so there.

The fact that this was utterly bonkers, the complete opposite of good management, not to mention just plain inconsiderate didn’t seem to occur to him, but at this point in my time working under him, I was not surprised. It also completely contradicted a previous edict he had once issued after we’d adjusted our shift pattern at the last minute to deal with a problem, only to be raked over the coals for not consulting him first!

The one other thing I got out of this incident was that during our argument, I accused him of not dealing with my upcoming leave request, something he was well known for not doing. I wanted a week off for my fortieth birthday and had put this into the system nine months earlier. “I was just dealing with that!” he barked at me, which basically meant that he had utterly forgotten about it until I mentioned it. This was proven the next day, when we found out that he had rung up a colleague at our other site, practically pleading with him to cover my leave later that month.

Some years ago, I worked in a large call center as a department supervisor. One day, I was in a small office off the main floor. It wasn’t assigned to anyone in particular; all the lower- and middle-management people used it occasionally when we needed it.

I was working there alone when a Human Resources assistant who I knew quite well came in, supporting a young Customer Service Representative who we’ll call Annie. Annie appeared shaken and pale. [HR Buddy] helped her to a chair, and I went over to see what was up and find out if they needed me to leave to give them privacy. It turned out that Annie had tripped on the stairs and fallen — luckily only a couple of steps.

Me: “Oh, poor you! Are you okay? Are you hurt anywhere?”

Annie: “It’s just my wrist; it really hurts.”

Her wrist seemed to be swelling as we looked at it, and she could hardly move it.

HR Buddy: *To me* “I saw her come down on it hard. I think she’d better go to A&E and get it X-rayed.”

At this, Annie looked downright panicked.

Annie: “No! I don’t want an X-ray!”

[HR Buddy] and I were puzzled. Bear in mind, this is the UK, so Annie wouldn’t need to worry about a bill for a hospital visit.

Me: “I know it’s a hassle, and hospitals can be a bit scary, but your wrist might be broken. You really should get it checked as soon as possible; you might need a cast.”

Annie: *Almost in tears* “But I can’t stand needles! I’m terrified of needles!”

Gentle questioning elicited that Annie had no clear idea of what an X-ray actually was! She was frightened because she had some vague notion that it involved getting an injection, though she couldn’t explain why. I had to explain to her, as you would to a small child, that getting an X-ray meant the doctors would use a special machine to take a picture of her bones, no needles necessary, and that the doctors weren’t allowed to give her any injections without her permission anyway.

Eventually, we managed to convince her, and we called her mother to come pick her up and drive her to the hospital. I’m glad I was able to explain things to her so she could get the treatment she needed, and nobody knows a thing until someone teaches them — but wow, that’s a big one to miss for a whole twenty-something years of life!