A client called me at 11:30 pm and left a voicemail. Though parts of it were drowned out by the sounds of people and traffic, I could make out:

Client: “…serious issue we need to discuss.”

First thing the next morning, I called the client to clarify his issue. When no one answered, I left a voicemail. I also sent him an email to let him know I had received his message but could only make out parts of it. I told him to call me, return my email, or clarify when we meet at our bi-weekly meeting the next day.

Unfortunately, I received no messages, and the client simply didn’t show up for our meeting.

Concerned, I sent another email, made another phone call, and sent him a text.

Three days later, at 6:00 am, I received a phone call from him.          

Me: “What was the issue you needed to discuss?”

Client: “Oh, yes. We need to talk about how difficult you can be to reach.”

I was selling some household items and agreed to do a public meet-up with someone outside a grocery store at 3:00 pm. I also needed groceries, so I did my shopping and was back in my car by 2:50. I messaged the buyer to describe my car and tell her where I was parked. She didn’t answer.

3:15 came and still no reply. I had eggs in the car and didn’t want to keep waiting and using my gas to keep the car cool.

Me: “Hey, if you’re not meeting up today, that’s fine. I just need to know. I have groceries in my car that need to get to the fridge.” 

3:30 came and went. I saw that she had opened the message but hadn’t said anything.

Me: “We’re going to have to reschedule this. I need to go. Let me know when you will be available.” 

I drove home — another fifteen-minute drive — and got my groceries put away.

At 5:45 that night, my phone went off.

Flaky Buyer: “Where are you?”

Me: “At home. We agreed to meet almost three hours ago, and you never showed up or reached out.” 

Flaky Buyer: “Okay, I got busy. Life goes on. I’m going to [Location an hour from my house] right now. Meet me there.”

I may have considered this generous response if she hadn’t opened the messages hours earlier. It could be that she had a small child or someone else was using her phone, but the delay and the eventual reply were not helpful.

Me: “Sorry, I’m not available anymore today. We can meet up this Saturday.”

Flaky Buyer: “This is f****** bulls***!”

She marked my post as spam and blocked me. I reported her as a no-call, no-show and listed the items again. They sold within an hour, and the person actually showed up the next day to get them!

I don’t work in tech support, but I am knowledgeable in troubleshooting, especially when it comes to software issues. I often help friends with PC issues in a telegram group I am in.

Today, we were all discussing playing a game as a group, and someone mentioned that they couldn’t play the game because it crashes and freezes at random. I immediately jumped at the opportunity to help.

Me: “How much RAM do you have?”

Friend: “I have 16 GB.”

Me: “How much does the game use?”

Friend: “I allocated it 2 GB. But most of the RAM is taken up by Chrome.”

I was confused. Yeah, Chrome is kind of notorious for eating up RAM, but there was no way it was using up nearly 16 GB of it. Nonetheless, I stated the obvious:

Me: “Then close Chrome when you play the game. Force-close it in Task Manager.”

Friend: “I don’t want to do that. It takes forever to start Chrome up again.”

Obviously, it wouldn’t take that long to start Chrome again, so I was confused. I let some other friends do some tech-support-talking for a bit, and then [Friend] revealed the actual problem.

Friend: “I have 1,850 tabs open.”

Me: “Why do you have so many tabs open?”

Friend: “I’ve just done it for so long that I’m used to it.”

Friend #2: “Dude, close some of them!”

Friend: “I don’t want to, and I don’t want to bookmark them because that will take forever.”

At that point, I gave up.

Me: “You know the problem and the solution to the problem. I can’t help if you don’t want to fix it.”

And I moved on. I knew their claim that it would “take too long to restart the browser” was bogus now, since they were never going to close it to begin with.

I will never understand how people can know the problem AND the solution to it but still decide to ask for help, knowing full well that they will never fix it anyway.

I sell items on eBay. I get a notification that a recent sale is being disputed as not what was advertised. I check the dispute reason.

Customer: “You only sent me one [item], and you said you were sending four!”

Me: “Nowhere did I state that I was sending four [item]s. Where did you get that idea?”

Customer: “You have four of them on your selling page!”

Me: *Double-checking* “I did not state that anywhere on the listing.”

Customer: “Then why are there four pictures?!”

Me: “To show buyers all the angles of the item. Did you think it was one item per photo?”

It is over a day before I get this response.

Customer: “You should have made that clearer!”

Their dispute was not upheld!

As part of a career change, I once took an online university course. When I got a paper back from the instructor, I was dismayed to see several grammar and spelling errors indicated. In my existing career, I’m a language professional and have been for twenty years, so I was puzzled by this to say the least.

On closer inspection, it turned out that the instructor had accepted all of the suggested “corrections” from Microsoft Word, marking them as though each had represented an actual error. Of course, they hadn’t, given how the spelling and grammar check works: the corrections are merely suggested, and it’s up to the user to decide whether the change makes sense or not.

In fact, in some cases accepting the suggested change introduced an error. For example, it corrected “assuming that” to “if” in a sentence, for “concision”. But I wasn’t using “assuming that” to mean “if”; I was literally referring to the act of assuming (e.g. “Client-centered care can include not assuming that the therapist understands the client’s background,” etc.), so replacing it by “if” made the sentence gibberish.

Never mind, of course, that I had obviously typed the thing in Word, so I had seen all the same suggested corrections she had and decided that they weren’t appropriate. 

It’s hard to describe how personally and professionally indignant I felt about this, especially because she had docked me marks for each of these “corrections” and left a little comment about “paying more attention” to spelling and grammar!

I still got above a ninety (out of 100) on both the paper and the course, so I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle to complain about, but it still rankles me.