One day, [Shift Leader #1] informs me that [Assistant Manager] wants us to close down the grill at 9:00 pm — no more food orders after 9:00. I am mildly puzzled since we are open for another hour, but I don’t question orders.

Several months later, a couple of regulars want to order something grilled, and it is 9:30. I apologize and tell them that I am sorry, but we closed the grill at nine. They demand to speak to [Shift Leader #2], who comes out and gets in my face.

Shift Leader #2: “WHY DID YOU TELL THEM THE GRILL IS CLOSED?! IT NEVER CLOSES! ARE YOU STUPID?! WHY THE H*** WOULD YOU TELL THEM IT CLOSES?!”

I’m near tears from being yelled at.

Me: “[Shift Leader #1] said [Assistant Manager] told us to!”

Shift Leader #2: “YOU ARE A G**D*** LIAR! She would never tell you that! I’m writing your a** up, and you’re getting suspended for this!”

I nearly hyperventilate right then. I keep insisting that I was told to do it and was just following orders, but she won’t have it. I finish the night out, break down crying, and run to my car and leave. I seriously consider quitting.

[Shift Leader #2] and I both have the next day off. [Shift Leader #1] goes in and sees the write-up I was given and the notice that I am to be suspended for “insubordination” because of my “lying” to [Shift Leader #2].

The following day, I go to work and I’m not looking forward to it. To my shock, [Shift Leader #1] runs in — she usually doesn’t run, so wow! — and takes me into the office with her and the manager. She asks me what the h*** happened.

I break down all over again, telling her how [Shift Leader #2] yelled in my face. She storms out and practically drags [Shift Leader #2] in by the ear.

I am asked to wait outside for a second, but [Shift Leader #1] is so peeved that I can hear the chewing out through the closed door.

Shift Leader #1: “[Shift Leader #2], your behavior is inexcusable. First of all, you never get into an employee’s face like that or yell at them. Second of all, I did tell [My Name] to close the grill at nine. You wrote [My Name] up for following orders.”

Shift Leader #2: “How was I to know that?!”

Shift Leader #1: “It would have taken you less than a minute to call me to confirm what I had said. Even if I didn’t pick up, you could have asked me at a later date.”

Manager: *Equally loudly* “Furthermore, [My Name] would be fully in her rights to bring down the thunder on your head! You need to take one huge step backward on your attitude and behavior, because if this is how you’re going to treat employees, you’re a liability to the company.”

The chewing out does a lot to put a soothing balm on my heart, even though the conversation quickly quiets down and I can’t hear them anymore.

When I come back into the room, [Shift Leader #2] is very quiet and won’t look me in the eye.

Manager: “[My Name], I am very sorry that you were treated this way by [Shift Leader #2]…”

He issues a number of platitudes about [Shift Leader #2]’s behavior not being in line with company policy, etc., but at least his apology seems sincere.

Shift Lead #1: “Now, I admit that I am at fault in that I misunderstood [Assistant Manager]; we’re supposed to close the hotbox at 9:00 pm, not the grill. So going forward, please keep that in mind. But I promise you that you did not do anything wrong and the misunderstanding is on me.”

The manager rips the write-up to pieces in front of me and then runs it through his shredder.

Manager: “If you would like to take the day off and just breathe, I’ll make sure you’re paid for the whole shift.”

I decided to take him up on the offer, and though that job had its usual retail headaches, from then on, [Shift Leader #2] avoided me unless it was directly work-related.

I am working at the front desk at a furniture store. I often end up doing whatever the h*** managers don’t want to do; this is a family-owned operation. When I started with this job, I was an idiot and made the mistake of saying yes whenever my manager asked me to work extra hours because I had bills to pay after having been jobless for about a month and a half. Of course, my manager(s) took that to mean that they could make me work whenever they didn’t want to come in.

Fast forward about a year, and my manager is going to be out of town. By this point, I’m in a mini-argument with her every week about being able to take my REGULAR days off; she keeps trying to come up with reasons she needs me to open the store or come in during the middle of the day, etc. It’s a whole bunch of bulls*** and I should have reported them. Anyway, she’s going to be out of town and she pulls me into the back to have this conversation.

Manager: “Okay, while I’m gone, I need you in every day.”

Me: “No.”

Manager: “But [Salesperson #1] doesn’t have a key so you need to show up to let him in, and [Salesperson #2] won’t open the store.”

They really cater to whatever the salespeople want because they “make the store money.” [Salesperson #2] literally works for like four and a half hours a day, two days a week, and doesn’t do anything except sit when there aren’t customers in the store. [Salesperson #1] is an a**, but at least he’s willing to help rearrange things or clean and dust displays.

Me: “I’m not coming in on my days off.”

Manager: “I need you to open the store.”

Me: “[Delivery Guy #1] can do it; he’s already said he would.”

Manager: “No, you need to come in and help me out.”

Me: “I’m not coming in on my days off.”

Manager: “Please?”

Me: “No. Next week is actually my birthday and I’m not coming in.”

I am lucky enough that my birthday falls on my actual day off this year.

Manager: “Well, can you just come in until like five or six and then go to your party?”

The store is only open until eight. By this point in the job, I am pretty much trying to get fired because I am so tired of everything. And I really don’t want to come in on my birthday, let alone my day off. The only reason I haven’t quit is that I can’t afford to leave without having another job already lined up. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that she wouldn’t have fired me without me literally setting something on fire.

Me: “No. I’m not coming in on my birthday and I really don’t want to come in on my days off.”

Manager: “I need you to open the store while I’m gone.”

Me: “[Warehouse Manager] can do it.”

Manager: “He’s taking care of something else for me while I’m gone.”

The warehouse manager is in the store every day, but he literally stays in the back office and sleeps. He only comes out if something needs to be fixed or I am unable to go to the warehouse to receive deliveries.

Me: “I’m not coming in on my birthday.”

We ended up going back and forth for a while longer and I (stupidly) ended up caving. I did walk out at like twelve, but still. The rest of those two weeks was ridiculous. I ended up clocking something like 100+ hours for that period because I wasn’t ever able to take lunches and she was making me stay all day. Then, to top it off, I only actually got paid for something like eighty-five hours because “accounting will automatically take an hour for lunch no matter what” and [Manager] “didn’t pay overtime.”

I seriously should have reported them; there were so many violations and just plain bad business practices! When I left, I was so glad to get out of there that I ran as fast as I could and never looked back. I will admit to laughing my a** off when I saw that they’d gone out of business about a year later.

When I am sixteen, I get my first job busing tables and washing dishes in a restaurant during summer break. At the beginning of the summer, shortly after I start working, my family plans a week-long vacation later in the summer. I ask my boss if I can have that week off, and he tells me to write my request down on the Requests Calendar. I do so, let him know that I’ve written in the dates, and don’t think anything about it until the next day when my boss tracks me down.

Boss: “Hey, [My Name]. I see you requested [vacation dates] off on the calendar?”

Me: “Yeah, I did. Did I do something wrong?”

Boss: “No, it looks okay. But in the future, you should only use pencil on the calendar; pen ink tends to smear, so it gets hard to read sometimes.”

Me: “Oh, I wasn’t told about that. There wasn’t a pencil or anything by the calendar, so I just grabbed the first thing I could find to write with.”

Boss: “That’s fine. Just make sure you find a pencil next time.”

Fast forward a few weeks. The week before my family vacation, my mom schedules a dentist appointment for me for the week after we get back. Remembering my boss’s instructions, I find a pencil and write in my request for the day of my appointment on the calendar.

My vacation comes and goes, and the day of my dentist appointment arrives. I’m sitting in the dentist chair and my phone starts ringing in my pocket. Obviously, I don’t answer it. Immediately after, it rings again… and then again… and then again. Finally, after the fourth call, it stops ringing.

After my appointment, I check my phone and see that every call was from my boss. I get back to the waiting room, and my mom asks me if I made sure to request the day off work; apparently, my boss had called her, too, trying to find out why I wasn’t at work.

When I get to work the next day, my boss tries to chew me out for skipping work. I insist that I requested the day off and walk over to the calendar to prove it to him. I find the day in question… and see very clear evidence of pencil eraser.

Yep. My boss erased my request. Some of my coworkers later told me he was known for doing that, which was why he insisted that everybody wrote their requests in pencil. Everybody else had learned to take pictures of the calendar as proof, but nobody told me that. Luckily, the new school year started soon after and I was able to leave that job. I found a better job with a much better boss the next summer.

My dad was in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, and his unit was deployed to Vietnam in the late 1960s. Since the Air Force is not known for having a lot of experience with ground combat conditions, the entire unit was sent to an Army base in Texas to get some training on how to survive in a war zone.

At the Army base, Army sergeants, several of whom were veterans of two wars, did their best to try and teach young Airmen some of the hard lessons the sergeants had learned in combat. They learned how to shoot and maintain their rifles, the difference between “cover” and “concealment,” and what to do during an attack. The sergeants were very earnest and diligent, but a lot of what they were trying to teach — over a three-week period — needed a lot more time to get through the heads of a lot of the Airmen. They were basically trying to condense the Combat Infantryman course down to a couple of weeks.

Late in the day, near the end of the course, a sergeant gathered all the Airmen in a large group in the middle of an empty field. About fifty yards from where the Airmen were bunched together was a circle surrounding them. The sergeant started his spiel by pulling a Russian grenade out of his pocket and holding it up for the Airmen to see.

Sergeant: “This is a Russian F-1 fragmentation grenade. The Viet Cong have a lot of these, and they work really well. They’re very similar to the frag grenades we use. This particular grenade has a three-and-a-half-second fuse, which starts burning once the pin is pulled.”

The sergeant pointed at the cotter pin.

Sergeant: “The grenade goes off at three and a half seconds, spreading metal fragments from the casing over an area of about 200 yards. The effective lethal radius of the grenade is only about fifty yards.”

The sergeant then pointed at the white chalk line surrounding the group.

Sergeant: “That white circle out there is fifty yards. Remember, by the time a grenade lands, the fuse has already been burning for a couple of seconds. If I pulled this pin and dropped it right here in front of me, none of us would make it to the fifty-yard line before it went off.”

The sergeant went on, clearly describing what the effects of the grenade would be and repeatedly emphasizing that running away from the grenade would be useless, as they wouldn’t be able to make it past the effective blast radius before the grenade went off.

Then, to everyone’s horror, the sergeant pulled out the cotter pin and dropped the grenade at his feet.

My dad immediately ran away as fast as he could. Most of the other Airmen stayed put, and the sergeant made no attempt to move or take cover.

The sergeant then shouted, “BOOM!”, probably scaring the fertilizer out of several Airmen. The sergeant picked up the grenade and reinstalled the cotter pin.

Sergeant: “You’re all dead, girls. If that had been a live grenade, there’d be nothing but a lot of poorly-trained hamburger where you’re all standing.”

Then, he pointed at my dad, who was slowly walking back toward the group.

Sergeant: “All except [Dad’s Last Name]. He actually made it past the circle before the grenade went off. [Dad’s Last Name], you go ahead back to the barracks. Good job. The rest of you are going to join [Other Sergeant] and me on an exercise about how to react when someone throws a grenade at you.”

The Army’s training for my dad’s unit turned out to have been mostly wasted, because the unit was assigned to a base in Vietnam which was widely considered the safest place in Asia at the time. It was only attacked once by long-range rockets, and no one on the base ever saw or heard any shots fired in anger outside of that one incident. My dad came back to the World unharmed and never talked much about his tour there. This is the only “war story” he ever told anyone.

I work at a small-town branch of a bank. I often get asked other questions that have nothing to do with banking. One customer asks if I know the number to the local DMV office.

Me: “I don’t, but I can Google it for you.”

Customer: “Oh, thank you! So helpful.”

My boss comes up behind me as I’m typing and hands me the phonebook. I’m in my twenties, and I haven’t seen a phonebook since I was a little kid.

Me: “Um… what’s this for?”

Boss: “I heard you say you needed to look up a phone number. We have a phonebook in the back. Here you go!”

Me: “Actually, I just Googled the number.”

I write the number down for the customer. She thanks me again and leaves.

Boss: “So, you found the number for the DMV on the Internet?”

Me: “Yes. I do it all the time.”

Boss: “But we have a phonebook!”

I examine the phonebook in question.

Me: “This thing is as old as I am.”

Boss: “It still works!”

Me: “So, no one’s number has changed in two and a half decades?”

Boss: “Uh…”

Me: “That’s why I look online. Generally, you’ll find updated information.”

Boss: “But you can use the phonebook.”

Me: “You can use it. I’ll stick to Google.”