I had been working at a factory for about a year when they hired another new guy. The new guy immediately singled me out as some sort of enemy after being told that I was also fairly new, and he was always running off to our supervisor trying to get me in trouble. Our supervisor always “investigated” just to appease him, but he never even pretended to discipline me because he knew what the new guy was up to.

One day, I got done using a specific machine, cleaned everything up, and headed out for a short break. This machine has a lot of different settings, so every time you use it, you have to make sure the settings are correct before you start. If you don’t, the best-case scenario is that the parts come out wrong and fail inspection. Worst-case scenario, the entire machine breaks, and the factory basically has to shut down until a new machine can be bought and installed. The new guy had been trained on this machine and knew that he needed to check the settings, but he never did.

I got back from my break, and the new guy was running parts on the machine that I just finished using. The machine was making some bad noises, and I realized that he had forgotten to adjust the settings. I tried to warn him to stop the machine, but he brushed me off, so I hit the machine’s Emergency Stop button to stop him from doing any more damage than he might have already done. Obviously, this enraged the new guy, and he stormed off, returning a few minutes later with our supervisor.

Supervisor: “Hey, [My Name], [New Guy] tells me you were screaming at him for using the machine?”

Me: “I was using it before my break, running different parts than he’s trying to run. The machine was making all sorts of sounds when he was using it like he hadn’t adjusted the settings for his parts, but he refused to stop when I told him the settings were wrong, so I hit the Emergency Stop.”

Supervisor: “[New Guy], did you check the settings?”

New Guy: “I was just using this machine yesterday, and it was running fine. If anything is wrong with it, it’s [My Name]’s fault for messing with the settings.”

Supervisor: “[My Name], what parts were you running this morning?”

I tell him, and [Supervisor] checks the settings on the machine and confirms that they are correct for those parts.

Supervisor: “What parts are you trying to run now, [New Guy]?”

The new guy tells him.

Supervisor: “Then it’s pretty obvious what happened. [My Name] adjusted the settings correctly to run his parts, but your parts need different settings. [New Guy], are you sure you checked the settings before starting these parts?”

New Guy: “Well, [My Name] should have put the settings back to normal after he went and changed them!”

Supervisor: “There is no ‘normal’ setting for this machine, [New Guy]. That’s why you need to check before every job.”

Our supervisor told me to head on to my next job and ended up training the new guy on the machine AGAIN.

A few weeks after this happened, the new guy forgot to check the settings on the machine again and completely broke the machine. He tried to blame me for “messing with the settings again,” but our supervisor obviously didn’t believe him. The new guy was fired for negligence, and the factory lost a lot of time and money waiting for the new machine to be installed.

My retired father has a friend whose cousin is an olive oil producer. My father placed an order for his former colleagues. On Saturday, the day his old job is closed, he receives a text message from his friend saying he has the order, but my father can’t pick it up that day.

On Monday, he calls his old job.

Father: “The olive oil order has arrived. When can I come?”

Receptionist: “You can today! We are open until 6:00 pm.”

Father: “No problem. I’ll come in the early afternoon.”

He calls his friend.

Father: “I can come at the end of the morning to pick up the olive oils.”

Friend: “I am not at home today. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

Father: “But you sent me the text message on Saturday.”

Friend: “I was at home on Saturday.”

Father: “And I promised my colleagues that they would get their order today.”

The order is now scheduled for Wednesday. Let’s hope my father understands that before promising things, you have to be sure that the other people involved can be seen in time.

I overheard a coworker talking to a customer over the phone.

Coworker: “Well, when a Mommy Phone and a Daddy Phone love each other very much, they like to BlueTooth…”

My company hired a young man who took a desk near mine. He’s very personable and easy to talk with. One day, I’m called in to the boss’s office.

Boss: “[Coworker #1] was six hours overdue with what he was supposed to get done. He said you were distracting him by talking. Were you doing that?”

Me: “He’s a nice guy and we exchange some small talk now and then, but not six hours of it. Besides, I have my own work and I got it done.”

Boss: “Yeah, I guess that wouldn’t account for six hours.”

Me: “No, but I’ll watch that any talk doesn’t get out of control.”

Fast forward many months. We move to a new office and I am no longer near [Coworker #1]. Then, I wind up in the hospital, and when I return to work, I am buried. Finally, things slow down. I need to stretch, so I go to visit another coworker. It is a Friday and numerous employees take off alternate Fridays, so there are only a few people in the office. I look at the empty desk that I know belongs to [Coworker #1].

Me: “Where’s [Coworker #1]?”

Coworker #2: “We fired him a couple of months ago.”

Me: “Seriously?! Wow! I’ve really been out of it the last couple of months. Why was he fired?”

Coworker #2: “He was too slow. He was taking hours and days to do things that should take minutes.”

Me: “Back when he first started, he threw me under the bus. He blamed me for delaying him six hours on a project.”

Coworker #2: “Yeah. I’m not surprised. It was always someone else’s fault.”

But, seriously, despite an illness, how did I manage to not notice someone gone out of an office of only a dozen people?

When I was still in college, I got a summer job through literal nepotism; my uncle was the publisher of the magazine I worked at. It was a small office and everyone knew and liked my uncle.

One day, after I’d been there for several weeks, some of the editors started talking about how happy they were that the other intern and I turned out to be such great people to work with and that it seemed like the intern they’d been dreading wasn’t going to show up after all. Apparently, the previous year, someone high on the food chain had hired their kid for the summer and she was horrible. This year, they’d heard that the publisher was hiring his kid and they were all extremely relieved that hadn’t happened.

I looked at them quite quizzically.

Me: “Um, no, it’s the publisher’s niece. And he did hire me!”

They were completely gobsmacked. They had all spent weeks dreading being forced to work with someone who would do nothing and make their lives miserable again, while also quite enjoying my presence. How they missed that I was the person they were dreading, I don’t know. We have an extremely unique last name. The only people who come up when you Google that last name are very close relatives of mine.