My brother is feeding his kids. He gives his five-year-old daughter a bagel.
Brother: “Here, eat this, it will be delicious.”
Kid: “Dad, it’s so delicious.”
Brother: “Good, I’m glad you like it.”
A few minutes later…
Kid: “Dad, what does delicious mean?”
I’m a big guy and have previously been a bouncer/doorman/security at a few different venues for extra cash. During the St Patrick’s Day parade, my wife got tickets to the judge’s tent: free beer and shots of whiskey.
Afterwards, very well drunk, we were wandering around hitting up different bars. My wife is inside having a drink, and I’m outside by the entrance smoking a cigarette. A group of women comes up, stands in front of me, and holds out their IDs.
I look at them, confused, and go to say, “I don’t work here,” and the one in front starts annoyingly shoving her ID in my face.
I go into doorman mode and check all their IDs, spending time going over them all and comparing. I say they are good to go.
They walk past me to the door where the actual bouncer is. He asks for their IDs. The front girl turns and points at me and says:
Front Girl: “He already checked our IDs and said we were good.”
The bouncer looks at me, laughs, and says:
Bouncer: “Lady, he doesn’t work here.”
They all turn as one and glare at me. I laugh and turn away going back to what I was doing.
Client: “Hi, I’m calling about the house listings you emailed to me.”
Me: “Yes, did you like any?”
Client: “I thought I made it clear that I like level floors, [My Name].”
Me: “Yes, you did make that clear. All the houses I sent to you are recent renovations, including new floors that are level.”
Client: “Well, now I know you’re lying, because all these houses are in the mountains!”
Me: “Yes, they would need to be to have the views you asked for.”
Client: “But how can they have level floors if they’re on the side of a mountain!? Really, [My Name], you really should be on top of details like that if you expect to sell houses.”
Me: “Ma’am… do you think that houses on the side of a mountain are sloped at the same angle as the mountain?”
Client: “Of course they are!”
Me: “No, that’s not the case. They’re built into the mountain, so that they’re level.”
Client: “Why would I want to live inside a mountain?!”
Me: “No…”
I managed to convince her to go and see the house that she liked the most. She was impressed with both the level floors and the view (both prerequisites), but didn’t like that the road up to the house was so steep…
I work in the transportation industry. The driver involved in this story was driving for an account paid for by the local city government, which requires us to pick up passengers within a scheduled window. This driver had already called the office several times that day, seemingly just to waste our time, so I was already annoyed by him. In the evening, it was just me in the office, and some of his times hadn’t come through on our end, so I had to call him to get them.
Me: “I just need the pick-up times from [Passenger X] and [Passenger Y] this afternoon.”
Driver: “Okay, let me think … Yes, okay; [Passenger X] was picked up at 2:35, and then [Passenger Y] was at 2:10.”
Me: “…So, you picked up [Passenger Y] first?”
Driver: “No! I picked up [Passenger X], then [Passenger Y], and then dropped off [Passenger X], then [Passenger Y].”
Me: “…Okay, maybe I misheard something then. I have 2:35 for [Passenger X], and 2:10 for [Passenger Y].”
Driver: *Sounding exasperated.* “Yes!”
Me: “…Okay, that’s not possible, though.”
Driver: *Getting loud.* “Yes, it is!”
We argued back and forth for several minutes as I tried to explain to him why the numbers he gave me couldn’t have happened in the order he was insisting they happened in. Normally, I might have just accepted the numbers and put them in the correct order, but if I did that, it meant he was very early to passenger y, and he would be fined for it. I was getting frustrated that I was wasting my time arguing with him for his benefit when I had other things I needed to get to, and eventually shouted:
Me: “[Driver], are you driving a god-d*** time machine?! Because otherwise the linear progression of time makes it impossible for you to have picked up [Passenger X] at 2:35, FOLLOWED by [Passenger Y] at 2:10.”
Driver: “No, I did! Because… oh… Oh, no… I’m sorry, that was [Passenger W]. I… I picked up [Passenger Y] at 2:45.”
Me: *Actively banging my head against my desk.* “That makes more sense. Thank you.”
Driver: “Yeah … sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
Me: “Uh-huh.”
It was the single stupidest conversation I’ve ever had with a driver, but it did teach him not to jump straight to arguing with our call takers.
Among my duties around the office at a former job, I helped to streamline the various spreadsheets that are used by different departments. Most of them really should have been converted into proper databases, but that was an ‘unnecessary complication’, so I had to make do with what the bosses would sign off on.
Thankfully, I know quite a bit about spreadsheets, so I managed to streamline many of the processes. Some people, however, are just married to the old ways that they’ve “always done things”.
The following exchange happened while I was showing a coworker the updates that had been made to a report that he had to update each month.
Coworker: *Defensive.* “You know, I’ve been using Excel for thirty years. I think I know this better than you do.”
Me: *Struggling to stay polite.* “Maybe so. It’s just my job to keep up to date when Microsoft changes things, so I see the various improvements they make that aren’t obvious.”
Coworker: “Kids these days keep rushing around, and that just leads to mistakes! You can’t just trust computers to get things right.”
Me: “Okay… tell you what. How about this month, you run the old report, I’ll run the new one, and we can sit down to compare them. We can do that for a couple of months to make sure it all lines up. Would that help prove the new way works for you?”
Coworker: *Very grumpily.* “Fine.”
So, at the end of the month, I downloaded the data file, plugged it into the spreadsheet, hit refresh, and the whole thing populated across the various pages that needed to be calculated.
[Coworker], on the other hand, sat down for his day-long process of manually copying the data to various sheets, and then manually highlighting rows, punching in calculations, and deleting unneeded rows.
We sat down and started to go through the reports side-by-side.
On my side of things… There was one issue where a misspelled name in the original data set caused a row to get skipped during the calculations.
On his side… There were nine spots where he had either deleted a row he shouldn’t have, or left one in that should have been removed. Two columns of calculations where he divided when he should have multiplied, resulting in obviously too-small values. One calculated page that he had missed preparing entirely. And he also left out the row with the misspelled name.
We did the same thing the following month, this time with no errors on my part and a similar spread of errors on his. Which, naturally, led to… him refusing to use my report and continuing to calculate the report manually.
Sadly, his boss ‘trusted’ him and his numbers, and so believed him when he claimed that my report couldn’t be trusted. And thus, his reports would be off, I’d get pulled in when other reports I helped other departments with didn’t line up with his, and it’d always end up tracing back to a ‘slip up’ on his part, where he edited something wrong. But, somehow, that never translated to his judgment not being trustworthy, just him ‘being human’.
I am so glad to have seen the back of that company and working at a place that doesn’t reward neophobia.
