I worked for a major auto manufacturer in Detroit back in the day. Sometimes people from the French office would come into town for business trips, and they would get a car to drive from the loaner pool. There was one guy who was over for business and came in one day with his loaner damaged after being rear-ended: the back bumper was smashed and barely hanging on.

“Man, poor guy. It must be so stressful having something like this happen on a business trip in a foreign country,” everyone thought, and they swapped him into another car.

Not long after, he came back, and that car ALSO had the back bumper hanging off. “This guy must have the worst luck!” everyone thought, and they switched him into another car again.

You can probably guess what happened next: he ended up coming in with that car’s rear smashed up, as well. One of the higher-ups said what everyone was thinking: “Maybe this isn’t just a coincidence.” He brought the guy in for a meeting.

Manager: “What happened?”

Driver: “I’m driving on ze freeway and someone… BAM! Drive into ze back of my car!”

Manager: “Every time?”

Driver: “Yes!”

Manager: “Okay. Let’s back up. Before you got hit, what were you doing?”

Driver: “Well, I’m driving in ze fast lane, and I come up behind someone who is not driving fast enough. And he does not move over and doesn’t go faster, so I give him ze nudge.”

Manager: “Wait, what?”

Driver: “I, you know, I nudge him.”

Manager: “I’m sorry, what?“

Driver: “I give him, you know, ze nudge.”

Manager: “With your car?”

Driver: “Yes.”

Manager: “You can’t do that!“

Driver: “What do you mean?”

Manager: “You can’t do that!”

Driver: “I don’t understand. Is just a nudge!”

Manager: *Big sigh* “Okay, so… what would happen after you ‘do the nudge’?”

Driver: “Well, zey move over.”

Manager: “Yes…”

Driver: “And I pass.”

Manager: “Yes…”

Driver: “And then zey get behind me and BAM! Zey drive into ze back of my car!”

Eventually, they were able to get through to him why exactly this kept happening to him, and somehow — magically — it did not happen again.

My manager sent me to a retail office supply store for stickers that work with a postage machine. I walked in and, after searching the store, I couldn’t find what I needed, so I went to customer service. 

Me: “Can you help me? I need stickers for a [Brand] postage printing machine.”

Worker: “You need… what?”

Me: “Stickers… for postage?”

Worker: “Oh… okay, sure. Follow me.”

She led me to the aisle for staplers and staples. 

Worker: “Is this what you need?”

Me: “Um…”

Worker: “This is where all of our Bostitch items are. Is this what you wanted?”

Me: “No… Sorry, I need postage.”

Worker: “Yes, this is where all our Bostitch [Bahs-stitch] — Oh, I’m sorry, I mean Bostitch [Beau-stitch] items are.” *Walks away*

Me: “Um… Thanks?”

I worked with a guy who, in front of the office, would come up to payroll at the start of every December and ask how many sick days he had left. They’d quietly tell him. He’d loudly repeat it back to them.

Thus, before the new year, we knew how many days he’d be out sick, like clockwork.

This happened back in the early 1970s when I was a corporal in the Marines.

A couple of other jarheads and I were playing with our pocketknives in the shop one day. We worked in avionics/electrics on planes, and those knives came in handy while doing electrical work. Believe it or not, my forty-year-old son still keeps that knife with his “special” tools.

We’d taken turns sharpening the blades and I got a little careless. I put a clean slice in a thumb, but I didn’t think it was bad enough to seek professional medical help. Gunny had other ideas.

Gunny: “With that much blood, go to sickbay.”

This was Wednesday afternoon, a while before we were off work.

I headed over to sickbay and the corpsman there was a third-class medic, the same rank as me but he was in the Navy. He looked at it pretty closely.

Corpsman: “Hang on.”

He came back in a minute.

Corpsman: “Look, you don’t really need stitches, but it could stand ‘em. We’ve got a guy who’s never stitched up a real person and this would be the perfect first time for it. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

I didn’t even think about it.

Me: “Nah, I don’t mind. Everybody starts somewhere. He’ll never forget me. What did he put practice stitches in?”

Corpsman: “Uh… shaved dead goats.” 

Me: *Laughing* “Okay, let’s move him up to humans.”

It took a few minutes to get all the stuff ready. As the new guy was anesthetizing my thumb, I suggested:

Me: “Do it like you did the dead goats, just like they taught you.”

He laughed a bit.

New Guy: “All the goats recovered completely and now live on a farm in Nebraska.”

As the new guy put four stitches in my thumb, a thought occurred to me.

Me: “Look, I don’t mind being a live guinea pig, but is there anything in this for me?” 

Corpsman: “Let me go talk to my lieutenant.”

A Navy lieutenant is an O-3, the same as a Marine captain.

He came back in time for everything to be about wrapped up and asked:

Corpsman: “You got duty or anything this weekend?”

Me: “No, a regular weekend off for me.”

The new medic finished the bandage on my thumb quite nicely while we talked.

The corpsman handed me a piece of paper.

Corpsman: “Okay, here’s a ‘no-duty’ chit for four days: tomorrow, Friday, and then the weekend. It has you returning to ‘light duty’ on Monday, and then nothing strenuous until we take the stitches out in ten days. You just got yourself a four-day weekend!”

Oh, yeah.

We yukked it up a bit more and I left.

When I got back to the shop, Gunny was still there, I guess waiting for an update. I showed him my no-duty/light-duty chit, and he kind of lost it.

Gunny: “What?! Four days off for that little cut? Don’t leave yet.”

He proceeded to call up Medical.

This was a long time ago, and all we had was an old clunker of a military shop phone. It was that heavy black plastic, and if there wasn’t much noise around, you could easily hear it from several feet away. I heard everything clearly.

Gunny: “Yeah, this is [Gunny]. I have a corporal here who just got a few stitches and I need to know why he’s getting four days off.”

Person On The Phone: “Hang on, Gunny.”

After a minute:

Lieutenant: “This is Lieutenant Doctor [Lieutenant]. I was told you have a question?”

Gunny barked:

Gunny: “I don’t know why anybody would need four days off for a few stitches. Maybe you can tell me.”

Lieutenant: “First off, I’m a lieutenant in the US Navy, so if you can, throw in a ‘sir’ once in a while. Second, I have the utmost confidence in my team. If that’s what they determined the patient needed, that’s what the patient will get. I’d also like to add that I don’t allow my team to run around the base telling gunnery sergeants how to do their job, and I sure don’t appreciate you thinking you know more about medical procedures than they do — unless, of course, you have a medical degree similar to my own. If that’s the case, we can sit down and discuss this like rational adults. If you don’t, why don’t you stick to doing what you get paid to do and give us that same consideration?”

Gunny: *Defeated* “Yes, sir, I understand. Thank you.“ 

He gently hung up the phone and looked at me. I almost felt bad for him, but there was no way I was telling him the entire story now.

Gunny: “See you Monday, Corporal.”

Right after the Y2K nonevent, I was working at a help desk for a fairly large company — 15,000 employees. The company had a surprisingly kind corporate culture and thus had pretty good morale. People were allowed to decorate their cubicles pretty much as they saw fit (with the obvious exceptions like offensive posters, etc.).

One employee in a prestigious department called on a Monday and told us that her monitor had failed.

Flatscreens were a lot more expensive back then, so nobody had multiple monitors. I grabbed a spare and was at her cubicle within five minutes.

Her cube was like a greenhouse. She must’ve had thirty different potted plants in a modest cube. Flowers, spider plants, little bamboo… it would have driven me nuts to work in this crowded little grove, but it smelled like a clean forest after the rain and she was obviously proud of it.

The monitor was dead as disco. It wouldn’t even show me a power LED. I carefully moved four or five plants and swapped in the new one. Happy user, closed ticket.

One week later…

The ticket reopened the next Monday morning. Statistically, it is certainly possible for a beat-up spare screen to fail, but it isn’t likely. I grabbed a shiny new monitor, tested it at my desk, and installed it. As I swapped cables, I asked her what had happened.

Employee: “It just shut off! I didn’t even touch it.”

Two monitors failing at the same time on the same day of the week for one user? This is not a coincidence. I longed for a previous job where we had a hardware guy who loved to dig into dead equipment and figure out the forensics.

I verified that she didn’t have a heater in her cube (power surge, thermal issues) and that no other users had seen any issues or heard anything. I Googled the model of monitor that had failed to see if it had a bad reputation. I talked to the rest of my team. Nothing suggested a reason.

So, the next Monday, early, I was camped out in her cube with iced coffee and suspicion. [Employee] came in.

Employee: “Did this monitor fail, too?!”

Me: “I’m here to make sure it doesn’t.”

She was pleased with the level of attention on her issue.

I watched her start up the PC, turn on the monitor, and head out for her own coffee. All good so far. The PC booted properly and loaded up the series of apps that she needed at about the normal rate. They connected to servers across the country, so boot up took ten minutes or so from power on to ready for calls.

She came back with coffee… and a watering can.

I looked at the three potted plants on the shelf above her monitor and stopped her.

She’d been slightly overwatering those plants once a week. I don’t know why it hadn’t killed the monitor before this, but she didn’t use a power strip, and apparently, the main circuit breakers weren’t sensitive enough.

User educated, problem solved, ticket reclosed.