My family and I are moving to another state soon, and we want to get one more takeout meal from a local restaurant that’s been special to us for a long time. My wife and I went there for our first date in 1998, for instance.

I get there at 6:15 pm on Saturday and find the parking lot empty. Thinking, “Uh-oh,” I get out of my car and walk over to find a hand-lettered sign in the window saying, “We closed at 6:00 pm.” Darn. I go looking for a sign with their regular business hours, figuring I can come back the next day… and I can’t find one.

Great. Well, no hope for it. I tap on the window, knowing they’re going to think I can’t read the sign but with no other way to ask when they’ll be open on Sunday. I don’t have a cell phone, so I can’t just call them from the parking lot. I finally get the attention of someone inside, but sure enough, they just point at the sign. I nod — yes, I saw — and then try to hand-signal them that I want to ask about tomorrow’s hours. A second person sees me, points at the sign, and ignores my nods and gesticulations.

Finally, a third person spots me and does the same but comes over when I keep gesturing.

Employee: “READ THE SIGN!”

Me: “Yes, I read the sign. I understand you’re closed. But when are you open tomorrow?”

Employee: “Eight.”

Me: “Eight am? Eight pm? Is that opening or closing?”

Employee: “Eight pm.” *Walks off*

I gave up, figuring it was the best I’d get. I figured I’d come back the next day and get lunch for the fam. I ended up forgetting until mid-afternoon and going there for dinner instead. It was just as well I didn’t try for lunch, because the handwritten sign in the window then said, “We open at 1:00 pm.”

Not to nitpick, but how hard is it to: A) post your hours of operation more than a few hours in advance, and B) spend ten more seconds to clarify things for someone who’s been coming to your place for twenty-plus years?

I check in for a short break at a reasonably nice hotel. I’ve been all over the country for the last week. I have one more appointment in a few days, and then I can go home. I’m going to use this time to relax and get some paperwork done.

Me: “Can I request no housekeeping?”

Receptionist: “I can certainly put a note on your room, but if you hang the sign on your door handle, they shouldn’t make up your room.”

Me: “Shouldn’t? I really would appreciate it if I wasn’t disturbed. I have a lot of paperwork and it’s going to be everywhere. I really would prefer if it wasn’t disturbed.”

Receptionist: “I will add a clear note on your room, and I will leave a message with housekeeping.”

Me: “Great! Thank you!”

I spend the afternoon winding down. In the morning, I pull out the box of reports, receipts, service contracts, and the blanks I need for the last visit. I’ve covered the bed, desk, and part of the floor. I slowly work my way through before taking a long break to walk around the town. I get back to find a note on my door. I call reception.

Me: “I have a note on my door about housekeeping being unable to clean my room?”

Receptionist: “Oh, yes. The notes say that the room had a lot of paper everywhere. If you want your room to be cleaned, this does need to be resolved.”

Me: “I don’t want the room cleaned. I don’t want to be disturbed at all. There should be a note on the file, and I had the sign on the door.”

Receptionist: “There wasn’t any mention of the do-not-disturb sign on here.”

Me: “I’m not lying; it’s still on the door!”

Receptionist: “Well, I guess I can speak to the housekeeping team.”

Me: “Please do.”

Annoyed, but having to get work done, I carry on through the papers. I get pretty far that day and the next, thankfully not disturbed this time. On my last full day, I’m pretty much caught up. I go for a meal and a swim before coming back. The first thing I notice is the do-not-disturb sign on the floor outside the room.

When I go inside, the room has been tidied, and worse, the remaining papers have been stacked on the desk. Just a quick check tells me they have put everything out of order. Realistically, this will take hours to sort out. I go to the reception desk and demand an answer.

Receptionist: “I am sorry. I can see the original note and that you called to complain. I’m not sure what happened.”

Me: “Call a manager or something.”

Receptionist: “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

Me: “Just do it, please.”

She reluctantly did, and I went through everything again. The manager apologised and explained that he couldn’t see where the receptionist was actually passing on these messages, as housekeeping does not see the room notes, so they wouldn’t have seen the messages. However, it wasn’t acceptable that they then ignored the do-not-disturb sign.

I was offered a partial refund and vouchers for another stay. I made sure to use them at another site completely!

My boss asked me to give a training session to the team. When I saw that [Employee] would be there, I made sure everyone had a form to sign to say that they attended and that they understood the core material I gave.

As expected, [Employee] talked the whole way through. Being quite pretty and popular, she had a number of the guys ignoring me, too. I asked for their attention several times; she just wouldn’t listen. I delivered the subject and a few of the guys stayed behind to ask some valid questions, but [Employee] was straight out the door. I checked her form; she signed it misspelled in a silly way. Clearly, she thought it wasn’t entertaining enough.

A few months passed. I offered a refresher session as the system was going live, but it was declined. I took my week’s planned holiday and put it out of my mind.

I came back to a dozen emails from [Employee] asking how the system worked, copying my boss, asking why it wasn’t covered in the training, and more emails demanding that I go through it with her again and “do it properly”.

I went straight to my boss’s office.

Boss: “The emails? I know, I know.”

Me: “Have you had any other complaints? Did anyone else struggle?”

He thought for a moment.

Boss: “Nope.”

Me: “And you were happy enough with the training I gave you?”

Boss: “Well, yes. I don’t suppose I could convince you to train her again?”

Me: “Not a chance. I did you a favour last time. Not doing it again.”

Boss: “That puts me in a bit of a situation. You’re the only internal guy we have that is competent on the system. I will have to get an external company in.”

Me: “You won’t be able to for the next three months. There is one company that can offer the training: my old company. And they are up to their eyeballs in work.”

Boss: “So, what do we do about [Employee]?”

Me: “It’s not up to me, but admin needs help. That storeroom of theirs is a mess.”

I wasn’t there when he told [Employee] that, without the system, she didn’t have much work to do, and she needed to help the admin team. But I hear it was a shouting match and a half.

[Employee] threatened to quit twice and stormed off-site before realising she needed to actually keep her job, and she spent some time in the old dusty file storage.

I have really thick hair; at least four different stylists have told me I have the thickest hair they’ve ever cut. I usually wear it short, but one year, I decided to grow it out for a change and only got the occasional maintenance trim. I was in college a few hours away from my hometown (and my usual hairdresser), so I visited a discount salon that several of my friends had visited and had really good experiences with.

Hairdresser: “What are you looking for today?”

Me: “I’m growing my hair out, so I just want to neaten the ends a bit and get my hair thinned.”

Hairdresser: “Sure, I can add some layers.”

Me: “No, thanks, I’m keeping the style pretty simple for now. I just want it thinned.”

Hairdresser: “Most people, when they say they want their hair ‘thinned,’ they’re thinking of layers.”

Me: “No, I want it thinned, like with those scissors that have a comb on one side?”

Hairdresser: “That takes a lot of body out of your hair. A lot of people are disappointed when they asked for their hair thinned and I do that.”

Me: “I’ve literally never had a haircut in my life where I didn’t get it thinned. My hair is starting to poof out into this awkward triangle, and it looks bad on top of feeling heavy and uncomfortable. Trust me. I know what it will look like, and that’s what I want.”

Hairdresser: “Okay.”

She gave me layers. I was fed up at that point, so I paid and left. Within a month, my hair looked and felt so ridiculous that I decided I needed to get it cut again. I went to a salon that was accepting walk-ins. I made sure the hairdresser and I were on the same page before I would agree to an appointment, and I told her the story of the other salon. She was immediately indignant.

Hairdresser #2: “These layers are making your hair thicker. What was she even thinking?!”

I work for a large multinational company that provides software worldwide. As a result, documentation, embedded help screens, and the like are required to be available in dozens of languages.

While my team is multi-lingual, we can’t cover all supported languages within the team, and we’re not really supposed to. That’s why there is a dedicated translation team to support all software teams in this endeavor.

We dutifully sent off the text to be translated, and our department was charged for the use of the translation team as agreed. We waited and waited. We were getting up to the release date and no translation files had been provided. We escalated further and further up the management chain and finally got our files.

Those of us that could read other languages quickly checked the files we could understand, and then all the files were loaded into the software and shipped out.

And then, a sales rep from a country for which none of us spoke the language reached out. He found that the translation files for his language were horribly mangled. One screenshot he sent us had translated the name of the operating system to “Microscope [local name for a pane of glass],” instead of treating it as a proper noun.

Turns out the manager of that department did not retain the proper staff to cover all the languages required, didn’t want to pay the fee to hire an external temp, was sick of his management pressuring him to deliver on things they were being paid for, and had just tossed the text into a really cheap translation program without telling anyone.  

He ceased to be the manager of that department. Fortunately, the client who contacted the sales rep thought the whole thing was hilarious and did not cancel his purchase order.