I take a get-out-of-the-house job at a store with high turnover. I speak and read seven languages but don’t advertise it, ever, for reasons like this.

Coworker: “Anyone speak French?!”

Me: “Sometimes!”

Coworker: “Can you read it?”

Me: “Sometimes.”

My coworker shows me new holiday brochures.

Me: “It’s a suggestion of wines to drink with the meat.”

They give me a blank look.

Me: “It says, ‘Get this meat and this is the best way to get drunk with it.’”

Coworker: “Ooohhh! What’s that word?” *Points*

Me: *Pause* “‘Of.’”

That continued, with me saying, “‘Red,’” “‘Fancy grape type,’” and, “That’s English.”

Do they not require multiple languages in school anymore?

I’m seen as the spreadsheets expert in the office, which isn’t saying much, as most in the office are useless with them. A colleague has asked me about something she wants to do, but before I can advise her, she runs off for a meeting. I decide to leave a note on her desk. A week later, she asks me to come over.

Colleague: “So, I found an answer to that problem. It’s called ‘Concatenate’.”

Me: “I know.”

Colleague: “And since you didn’t even try to help me, I’ve put in a complaint about your attitude. That’ll teach you to do your job.”

I point at the note that is literally in front of her, on her monitor.

Colleague: “…”

Me: “You were saying?”

She retracted the complaint, but not before making a fuss to my manager that I should have told her directly, and that I should be reprimanded for my attitude. My manager later told me that whenever I haven’t been able to help someone, she usually gets a complaint about it. However, since it has absolutely nothing to do with my actual responsibilities, she doesn’t see a reason to do anything.

She now forwards those complaints onto me, and I have to say I get quite a laugh out of them. My favourite so far is, “He never told me how to right-click. Hours wasted, millions lost.” It was about how to change the font to superscript, so he could give a face he was making mini cat ears.

I had just started my first serving job at a chain seafood restaurant. Like many restaurants of this particular stature, we servers carried our own change, cash, and charge slips through the night and cashed out at the end of our shifts. Our managers told us over and over and over to never carry our cash in our order booklets and keep it in our pockets instead, but I liked having everything in one convenient place so I ignored their advice. 

One night, I was about an hour into my shift. I took a table’s order, made their salads, and then went to ring in their food, and noticed my booklet was gone, along with all my cash. I started looking around frantically for it. I got only passing sympathy from my coworkers as they worked their own tables, and I fell into a panic, not knowing what to do.

I eventually got a new booklet, retook the orders I needed to, and then continued as normal. Some coworkers told me that they saw my section partner walking around with her shirt untucked over her apron right about the time I started panicking about losing my booklet, and that a manager called her on it, and she promptly went to the back room to tuck in her shirt. This particular server who was my partner that night had been caught trying to steal other people’s tips a few times in the past. She, of course, denied it.

By the time I was told about this, she had already clocked out and left. I never before nor after saw anyone get their side work done and cash out that fast. I mentioned it to my managers but they just shrugged. What are they gonna do? The end of the night came and, of course, I was short by about $100, despite using all tips earned to make up my loss. I got written up and I went home with nothing but my hourly wage — just over two dollars — for my trouble.

My lesson was learned that night and I never kept my cash in my order booklet again. Despite no one being able to prove anything, I think the managers were fed up with my section partner that night because I only ever saw her partnered in the future with the veterans that she couldn’t pull anything on if she even tried.

At my summer internship, one of the intern duties was logging and responding to complaint and query letters. Once we were done with the response, it was reviewed by a supervisor and then sent out. This ensured that responses were approved while sparing the salaried employees a lot of the grunt work researching them.

Because it took several days for a letter to be approved, I suggested to a fellow intern — there were five of us — that we create a shared doc about who was working on what so that we wouldn’t all accidentally write responses for the same issue. He told me he didn’t like the idea. I still brought it up to our supervisor, but she told me not to, because when there were multiple responses to the same issue, it allowed them to pull from all of them and give the most accurate response. I dropped the idea.

Towards the end of the internship period, I was talking to another intern and venting about a difficult response I’d been researching. She was confused and told me that I hadn’t marked down that I was working on that. I asked her to explain and discovered that the first guy I’d talked to had taken the idea for a spreadsheet and had been passing it off as his own among the other interns. 

I wasn’t sure how to handle the issue, but luckily, fate resolved it for me. One of the other interns mentioned the spreadsheet in front of our supervisor, who was less than happy about it. She asked me about it, since it had been my original idea, but since my name wasn’t on the doc, I was the only one who didn’t get lectured about it.

To make it even sweeter, the guy who stole my idea in the first place got called into the big boss’s office and was yelled at about how stealing someone else’s ideas and passing them off as your own is unethical behavior that wouldn’t be tolerated. He didn’t end up getting fired, but he was on probation for the rest of the internship. I’m guessing he didn’t get a good letter of reference out of the whole thing.

I work as clerical support and a receptionist on a busy day ward. We occasionally get calls from companies that manufacture medical equipment to tell us about their products in the hope the hospital will buy them.

One day, I got a call from such a company. The person on the phone began with, “Are you a hospital in need of new medical equipment?”

A little confused and too busy to take the call, I asked them to call back later and hung up.

Within minutes, my colleague had a call. It was obviously from the same company because I heard him reply, “Well, I’m not a hospital myself, but the building that I am in is a hospital. The hospital is very busy at the moment, but I can speak for it.”

I could barely speak because I was laughing so hard!