CONTENT WARNING: Gross

During the Black Friday rush, I was helping a customer and his girlfriend. During the transaction, I noticed his girlfriend looking more and more ill, and she soon sat on the ground.

The customer noticed something and quickly asked me for a bag, which I readily handed over. Of course, things couldn’t be simple as the girlfriend said, “No,” and promptly vomited on the floor. Great.

Now, I did hope she felt better, but I had a problem now. No one in my department was trained for biohazards, and vomit was in that category, so I called for a manager to clean it up because only team leads and higher could do that. The only team lead at the time said:

Team Lead: “Hey, can you just clean that up?”

Me: “No, I cannot. I am not trained in that.”

And of course, said team lead refused to come clean it up. So here I was, trying to help customers while my teammate kept an eye on the… spill… and kept other customers away from it. Someone helpfully donated their cart to put over it after they had finished, but it took a good hour for another team lead to take pity and help clean it up. And that was with us doing calls for assistance for it every five minutes or so. Because who wants to step in vomit?

Related:
On The Need For Hazard Pay, Part 34
On The Need For Hazard Pay, Part 33
On The Need For Hazard Pay, Part 32
On The Need For Hazard Pay, Part 31
On The Need For Hazard Pay, Part 30

CONTENT WARNING: Fatal Car Accident

I am never late for anything unless something way out of my control happens. My coworkers laugh about the time I was going to be on time instead of my usual twenty minutes early and I panicked so much I called ahead to tell them I would be… on time. For weeks, they would call me to tell me they would be on time for their shift. It’s all in good fun; I don’t mind at all that being punctual is what I’m known for.

One day, honestly, everything goes wrong for me. We lose power overnight, which means my phone goes flat, which means my alarm doesn’t go off. I am working an earlier shift than normal, so my body clock is no help. When I get into the car, it beeps that it is on E, so I have to go get fuel in order to even make it to work.

All told, it’s seventeen minutes after my shift starts by the time my frazzled self makes it through the door. I’ve resigned myself to being made fun of when I walk in.

Manager #1: “[MY NAME]! Oh, my God! Thank God. Are you okay?!”

Me: “Hey, [Manager #1], sorry I’m late. I—”

Another manager scurries over.

Manager #2: “Oh, my God, [My Name], I’m so relieved you’re here! Are you all right?”

I once again start answering only for another coworker to come running over with a worried look on his face.

Coworker: “[My Name], holy s***. Can I give you a hug?”

I hug my coworker. It’s not that unusual — I’m a big hugger if people are comfortable with it and I’ve known him for years — but I notice that everyone looks like they’ve been crying or just incredibly upset and are stunned to see me standing there.

Me: “Okay, guys, I get that I’m late and that’s weird, but what the heck is happening?”

My manager very somberly told me that they were all joking around about me not being there super early when someone told them that a few blocks from the store a young woman driving a red sedan — the same colour and size as my car — had been hit and killed by a truck running a red light during the time I would have been driving to work. When they tried calling me, my phone was turned off and no one could reach me. They tried my girlfriend’s phone, but hers had also run flat overnight so it too was turned off.

So, that’s the story about how my being less than twenty minutes late to work had an entire store of people convinced that I was quite literally dead.

In the early 1980s, I was in the Marines. I was stationed in Japan for three years and picked up some basic — very basic — Japanese.

After I got out, I signed up with a temp agency to keep some income rolling in while I went to school. My first time out, I was sent to fill a job at a car factory that was under Japanese management. (I did not tell the agency that I spoke Japanese because I really didn’t, so this was a pure coincidence.)

All senior managers and a handful of mid-level managers at this plant were Japanese, but the rank and file were locals. This was also in the middle of Midwestern corn and soybean country, and the population was about 99% white — German or Norwegian, with a sprinkling of Scots. 

My job was pretty low-level, early-1990s administrative work, sorting mail, filing, and answering the phones. I was in the far-left corner of the Human Resources area, right across the aisle from one of the Japanese managers. I got the impression that he, along with the other managers, preferred to do business only with other Japanese staff, and only in Japanese.

One day, the phone rang, I answered it, and it was [Manager]’s wife. She evidently had misdialed, as I was not in his department and up until then had never had any dealings with him.

He was engrossed in papers on his desk, so I coughed politely.

Me: *In Japanese* “Excuse me, [Manager]-san. It is your wife.”  

The look on his face was priceless. Oddly enough, my desk was moved to the far right corner of the HR area the next day.

Many years ago, the company I worked in doing radio systems design had a group doing medical systems. A customer approached them with a requirement for a “pill” that was a swallowable endoscope to send back pictures of the small bowel — something that cannot readily be done with a conventional endoscope.

The medical products group had no radio design experience and they “borrowed” me for a three-day meeting in California. My manager, who I didn’t get on with, justified it to his manager by saying, “It’s only three days, and they haven’t a hope in h*** of getting the contract.”

So, off I went to California with a marketing man from Sweden, where the design work would be done, and we got the contract — which proved to be worth about $15 million by the time it was finished. The three days turned into three and half years as other projects appeared, much of which saw me in Sweden and California, and occasionally at my desk in the UK.

Toward the end of this time, layoffs were coming. My UK manager, who I had hardly seen, gave me a review — something he should have done annually but was too lazy to bother with. He said, not knowing or possibly not caring what I had been doing, that I “didn’t contribute” and “wasn’t a team player,” obviously setting me up to be laid off.

Three weeks later when I was in Sweden, the last flight back to London was delayed and I eventually got home at 3:00 am. The following day, Thursday, I didn’t go to work, but I went in on Friday to find a number of strange emails.

That Thursday, there had been a worldwide electronic meeting covering the US, Canada, Sweden, and Japan with subcontractors in Russia, Spain, and Australia. There it was announced that I had been given a $5,000 special award for “contributions to the Medical Products Group design team” — thus the strange emails.

Rather than being laid off, I was transferred permanently to that group, and my old manager took a voluntary layoff!

Karma, indeed…

I worked for a betting shop in the UK for around five years. For two of those years, I was stuck with one of the absolute worst people for a manager. She was a power-tripping, egotistical bully who believed she knew best in any situation just because she had worked in the industry for more than a decade. Here are but a few of the terrible things she did.

She didn’t fully train me on how to use the shop systems and got irrationally angry when I asked for help on something she hadn’t trained me on. (I had to teach myself 75% of the job.)

She blamed any and all cash discrepancies in the shop on anyone besides herself because her till could never be wrong.

She refused to postpone her breaks and help out when the shop entered busy periods, yet she expected everyone else to drop everything to help her.

She abandoned me to work a nine-hour shift (12:30 pm to 9:30 pm) by myself as punishment for some minor infraction.

She would expect the shop to be perfect 100% of the time and would repeatedly scream at any employee, including me, over the tiniest mistake. The till was £0.50 short? Screaming. One small area of the shop was dirty? Screaming. We were unable to get the right marketing information out due to a high volume of customers? Screaming. We were unable to do something the instant she asked for it regardless of whether we were helping a customer? Screaming.

That last one caused my mental health to completely tank. I had to take three weeks of sick leave and be moved to another shop closer to where I lived in order to continue working. Some people have told me I should have just grown a spine and stood up for myself, but when this is happening daily, and I had very little confidence due to it being my first-ever job, that gets pretty hard to do.

The silver lining is that this manager was eventually suspended due to a not-so-significant amount of money — at least £250 — disappearing while she was on shift, leading to her leaving the company. Whether she was fired or quit I don’t know; I was with a much better manager who actually cared about her staff at the time. But she was left with a permanent black mark on her record.