I moved to New Zealand about ten years ago. When we first came, we needed Wi-Fi ASAP, so I got the first Wi-Fi provider and new phone plan I could find.

I settled into my new home. After a while, inflation became even bigger, and [Wi-Fi Provider Company] was raising their prices. Up to this point, I never really worried about or considered my bill; I just paid it, and it was done. But then, I get this ridiculous bill sent to me. I watch my bill for a few months and use the least amount of data, etc., that I can. My bill is still ridiculously high.

So, I start researching better options and come across a great phone plan and Wi-Fi provider. I go to the mall where they have a store and set up an account with them and everything. Since my old supplier has a store a few meters away, I go to them to cancel my account.

Worker #1: “Hello, can I help you?”

Me: “Yes, please. I just came in here to cancel my plan and account. I’ve moved to a new provider.”

Worker #1: “Oh, yes. You can easily do that over the phone; it’ll save so much time. But we can do it in-store now if you like.”

I have dinner plans, so I decide to go home and do it over the phone. I don’t really know why it would be easier over the phone, but this guy seems nice enough to take his word on it.

I call the next day, asking to cancel my plan and delete my account. I don’t get the same guy that talked to me in the store (but that is totally fine).

Worker #2: “Ma’am, you’re going to have to come into the store in order to do that. We need to be able to identify you in order to shut down any accounts.”

Me: “But another employee said I could do it over the phone. Apparently, it’s faster?”

Worker #2: “Yeah, we can do it over the phone. But we still need you to come into the store and give us your number and ID so we know it’s your account.”

Me: “Okay, I’ll just come down, then.”

And I end the call. I get yet another worker when I come in. I explain what I want to do.

Worker #3: “I’m just a trainee, and I’m not allowed to do that. My manager just went to lunch, but you could wait for about ten minutes until she comes back. Or you could just do it on the phone.”

Me: “I was told I have to come into the store to do it. I’ll just wait for your manager.”

Bear in mind, I’m speaking really nicely to these people, but at this point, I’m just annoyed and want to get it over and done with.

I wait for the manager. When she comes back, I tell her what I want. 

Manager: “Unfortunately, you have to do that online or over the phone. There’s nothing I can do here.”

Me: “But several of your colleagues have said otherwise.”

Manager: “I’ll have a talk with them, but that’s just how it works.”

I take my leave and call from my car. Another worker answers and tells me I have to be IN-STORE for this. I tell him that I’ll come in AGAIN. I walk back into the store, and the manager sees me and asks me if she can help me.

Me: “I have been told I can easily close my account over the phone several times. When I’ve tried doing just that, they’ve said I need to be in the store. I was just in my car and called after you said it has to be done over the phone. Guess what they said?! I HAVE TO BE IN THE STORE!”

I don’t really shout but I show my irritation clearly on my face.

Manager: “Who did you talk to? I’m sorry about the inconvenience. I’ll have to talk to them. But you need to do it over the phone.”

Me: “You know what? I’m just not going to pay my bill anymore. I’m on a new plan and provider, so I’ll be fine.”

I left.

For about three months, I still got a bill, even though I hadn’t used them at all. Eventually, I got an email saying my account had been deleted because I hadn’t been paying my bill, and if I wanted to set it up again, I would have to do it in-store. In my mind, I joked, “No, it can also be done over the phone, right? HAHA!”

Manager: “I need you to come in tomorrow; we’ve had some call-outs.”

Me: “No can do. As soon as I finish my shift tonight my parents are picking me up and we’re driving out-of-state to my uncles for July 4^th.”

Manager: “Well then I give you permission to call your parents to let them know you can’t make it.”

Me: “Uh… no, that’s not possible. I booked this off with [Boss] last Christmas. I had to work all of Christmas so he said I could take three days off over July 4^th.”

Manager: “Well [Boss] isn’t here right now, I am, and you either come in tomorrow or you don’t come in at all.”

Me: “You realize that’s not the flex you think it is, right?”

Manager: “What do you mean?”

Me: “I am eighteen years old, living at home, and leaving for college after the summer. This job, to be blunt, means nothing to me. It simply pays minimum wage for my video games. You’re making me choose between this job and a nice weekend with my family that was promised to me, you’re not going to come out of the winning end of that argument.”

Manager: “But… we don’t have anyone to cover!”

Me: “You’re paid a manager’s salary to deal with a manager’s problems, my dude! Let me know before the end of my shift if I’m coming back after the weekend or not!”

Turns out the manager wanted to take the day off and go to the beach. He had to stay and work all weekend while I enjoyed my break and was welcomed back by the boss on my return. I stayed working there until college!

Related:
Minimum Wage Warrants Minimum Commitment

CONTENT WARNING: Car Accident, Injury, Blood

The brakes on my truck failed four days after I had them replaced at a well-known and popular auto place. Was the failure a fault of the mechanics or just bad luck? Who knows? But my poor truck went from being a perfectly serviceable vehicle to being completely totaled after I couldn’t stop while approaching a busy intersection. I tried very hard to not T-bone a very expensive SUV, but I was an inexperienced driver who wasn’t prepared for the possibility of not being able to stop.

I was on the way to work when my brakes failed. I wasn’t going very fast — perhaps 45 mph — but when I hit the SUV, my seatbelt moved from between my breasts to straight across one. My hand went partially through the windshield, and my airbag didn’t go off. I banged my knee pretty hard on the bottom of the steering column, and the container of scrap copper I had sitting behind my front seats decided it liked my lap better. I was a bit banged up. I didn’t have anything fatally wrong with me, but a day off would have done me a world of good.

While waiting for the police, I called work to let them know I wouldn’t be in. My boss laid into me.

Boss: “You are being unreliable; you should have given more notice! If you don’t come in, you will be written up and then some!”

He was known for being a bit of a jerk. At that point, I was in a lot of pain and irritated.

Me: “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

An hour or so later, I was checked out by the paramedics and my truck was being towed back home. The paramedics suggested that I go to the emergency room to be properly checked out. I had glass in my hand, and I was having trouble standing on my leg. I declined and took a rideshare to work.

I dragged myself into the warehouse, still covered in the blood from my hand and the minor cuts from the scrap copper. I approached [Boss] on the warehouse floor.

Me: “Where do you need me today?”

He turned just a few shades of white before fleeing in the general direction of the nearest bathroom. I later found out he has a thing about blood.

My coworkers, the lovely people they are, immediately brought me a chair and asked me what happened. An older coworker went off to find the boss. A few minutes later, he came back.

Coworker: “I’m taking you to the hospital. You’re excused from work for the rest of the week; I have a letter here signed by [Boss] declaring so.”

[Coworker] stayed with me while I got looked over. He then bought me some fast food, drove me home, helped me plop onto the couch, and made sure I had everything I needed to relax for the rest of the day. He promised to come back in the evening with his wife to help with anything I needed.

Once I recovered enough to go back to work, [Boss] avoided me like the plague until he moved on to a different job a few years later. The story I got from my other coworkers is that his boss ripped him a new one for trying to force me to work after a car accident and that if he so much as looked at me wrong, he was fired.

My injuries included a bruise that covered my breast and most of my torso that took months to heal, deep cuts on my hand that required some stitches and a lot of glass removal, cuts from the scrap copper that were painful but superficial, and a fractured kneecap. When I went back to work, I still did most of my job but my coworkers willingly took up the slack. I got lots of get-well cards, some of the most amazing get-well food, and the prettiest bouquet of flowers from them. [Boss]’s boss gave me a gift bag stuffed with chocolate and snacks, and [Coworker] had his wife help me keep my house clean for several weeks. She also helped me bathe without getting my stitches wet.

[Boss] never apologized to me.

Some four or five years ago, I was working for an IT firm whose office was in a business park. Public transport in the area was abysmal, with no buses and the nearest railway station two miles away. There was only one exit from the business park for cars, which led onto a very busy roundabout, which in turn led onto a motorway. During the evening rush hour, this motorway resembled the chariot race scene from Ben-Hur.

So, rather than endure a half-hour nose-to-tail crawl to get to the exit followed by a terrifying saloon car race, at five o’clock, I would rule off the day’s work but then spend an hour pottering on minor tasks — filling in time sheets, ensuring work was backed up, sending some emails, etc. Then, as the cleaners started to push a vacuum cleaner around my desk and chair, I would make a much more leisurely departure.

Unfortunately, I was diagnosed with a serious illness and scheduled for a major operation in four weeks’ time. My employers readily granted me time off, but in a misplaced bout of sympathy, they insisted that I leave work early every day up to my operation, at half past four. Since every senior member of staff from every other firm in the business park had the same idea, I was condemned to the previous hour-long mixture of tedium and terror. I attempted to invent urgent tech support issues so that I could work later, but management soon saw through that ploy.

Eventually, I asked for and was granted time off starting a week before my operation. Still, I have never understood the management’s idea that leaving early constituted a reduction in stress when they had only to look out of their windows to see the scrum of cars trying and failing to leave the business park early.

Working at a tech support help desk isn’t always the most entertaining job; sometimes you’re slammed and so busy you barely have time to think, and other times you have customers so rude or dumb you want to tear your hair out trying to help them.

To help alleviate some of the pain of work amongst fellow technicians I worked with, we’d find ways to play practical jokes on each other, and even our supervisor would get in on it.

One coworker brought in a small USB dongle that looked like a USB wireless keyboard/mouse adapter. He plugged it into another coworker’s computer, and it would do random things such as moving the mouse cursor or randomly entering letters or numbers when the coworker was typing. Watching the confusion and irritation was entertaining. We all laughed.

Another guy brought in some small devices. They had a small PCB board with a small speaker on it and a small watch battery, and it was designed to let out high-pitched beeps at random intervals. He hid half a dozen of these around the office, and it drove people crazy trying to find them. We all laughed.

I came into work one day and my work chair had been disassembled. The backrest and arms of the chairs were turned around backward and reattached. My supervisor did this one; he thought it was hilarious. I spent half an hour fixing it. We all laughed.

I took the coffee mug on my supervisor’s desk, tore up a bunch of colored paper to look like confetti, and packed it into the mug. I then placed a sheet of paper over the mug, turned the mug upside down on his desk, and pulled the paper out from under it. Now the mug was upside down and filled with a bunch of torn-up paper. When he got to work, he looked confused about why his mug was upside down, and he picked it up off the desk, thus causing torn-up colored paper to go everywhere. We all laughed.

I connected a second keyboard and mouse to the back of my neighbor’s computer and carefully hid the cables so you couldn’t see them leading back to my work area. Some of us had a spare keyboard or mouse on our desks just in case, and I had spare ones that sat behind my monitors, tucked out of the way. After the USB dongle prank, all technicians were aware of it and would look for it should odd things start happening on their computer. My neighbor sat down and started working, and just randomly over about a week’s time, I’d push the mouse or a random key on the keyboard I had connected to his computer, and it confused the heck out of him. He kept checking the USB ports on his computer, but he never saw any USB dongle, so he’d just go about his day. I’d been randomly tormenting my neighbor for about a week, but it came to an end when another coworker came up to my desk, grabbed the mouse I had connected to my neighbor’s computer, and just started using it and laughing while I was on lunch. That’s when my neighbor found that I had run a wired keyboard/mouse from my cubicle to his computer, and he unplugged them. We all laughed.

Anyone that left their computer unlocked when they went on break came back to silly background pictures that one of us would set as the desktop background. We all laughed.

A group of us worked together to dismantle and move everything in a cubicle of one of our coworkers (there was a legit reason why) to a different location. When he came in for work, his desk was empty, and he looked really confused. Then, our supervisor went up and told him that they “needed to talk”, and we could see panic starting to set in on the guy’s face. Then, we all laughed and told him they had to move his desk because of an electrical issue that needed to be resolved.

A coworker and I started taping over things on our supervisor’s desk while he was out for the day. We carefully covered the USB ports and such so it was hard to tell they were tapped over. We had headsets linked to our desk phones. When we answered calls, a piece of plastic for the receiver lifted up while we were on the phone, and when we hung up, the receiver lowered back down. We put tape on the plastic piece that raises the receiver up when you answer the call. The next day, we had kind of forgotten about all the tape. The supervisor came in, found things taped up, and chuckled. Eventually, a phone call was transferred to him. He went to answer the phone, and the receiver started to lift up and immediately fell down because we had taped the plastic lifter part, and it hung up on the call. Our supervisor was pissed that he had hung up on a customer, but at the same time, he thought the prank was funny. He couldn’t be mad at us about this prank because he partook in them, too.

After the tape prank, our supervisor said we needed to stop doing pranks before something more serious happened. It was entertaining while it lasted.