I was a truck driver making a collection from a unit on an estate. The entrance has an “in” and an “out” with a gatehouse in between. I pull up alongside the window and hand over my paperwork. The guy looks at it for a while.

Guy: “What are you delivering?”

Me: “I’m not. I’m collecting.”

Guy: “What are you collecting?”

Me: “I have no idea; the paperwork says one pallet.”

He makes a phone call and someone says that he should speak to dispatch. Eventually, he sorts it out and then produces a clipboard.

Guy: “What’s your name?”

I tell him.

Guy: “Registration number?”

I tell him.

Guy: “What company are you?”

I point to the name on the driver’s door right in front of him. It’s also printed on the paperwork I gave him.

Guy: “Where are you from?” 

Now I am getting a little irritated by the interrogation, but I do accept that it’s not his fault. 

Me: “Do you mean originally, today, or my last call?”

He looks at me, clearly thinking I’m a smarta**e, so I make something up for him to write on his form.

When I get to dispatch, they load the pallet on with a forklift and then give me a multi-page printout to sign. It clearly lists all the various items on the pallet. This happens from time to time, so I write “UNCHECKED” and sign.

Guy: “You can’t do that.”

I point out that I will have to strip the pallet to check that every item is on there.

Guy: “I checked it; you can take my word for it.” 

I mutter something about “Company Policy” and ask if he wants to take the pallet off again.

Twenty minutes and a couple of phone calls later, I set off, complete with the pallet. I stop at the gatehouse and the same guy comes over to the window on this side.

Guy: “What’s your name?”

I just drove off. I never went there again.

I work for an international company. One of my more stressful job duties is to translate at the quarterly team conference. I am the only person on my team who speaks English, so I interpret for the presenters from my team and HQ in the US. I’m not very good at interpreting, so having the materials in advance is really helpful — and standard practice for working with an interpreter. We usually get the presentation slides a week in advance, so normally, there is no problem.

While preparing for the last team conference, I noticed that one US presenter didn’t have any slides for her section. Some sections were still being moved or deleted as presenters dropped out, so I assumed she wasn’t going to present. 

The day of the team conference arrives. I do my best for about an hour through the first few presenters, and then the US presenter with no slides takes the Zoom floor. 

Presenter: “I have some points to talk about. [My Name], I emailed them to you a few minutes ago if you want to check your email.”

As she launches into her presentation, I click over to my email in a panic and see that she literally sent me her slides a few minutes ago, an hour into the conference! Worse, the slides aren’t attached to the email; she sent tiny screenshots of each slide almost too small to read. By the time I magnify it to a legible size, she has already read the first bullet point. 

Presenter: *Pauses* “[My Name], just jump in whenever you need to translate!”

I stumbled through awkwardly translating the text I could read from the slide. I wasn’t even the Zoom presenter, so no one could see her side except me. After her turn, I clicked back to the presentation for the next presenter, but I was flustered and couldn’t do my best work. 

Seriously, who emails their part of a presentation in the middle of the presentation, and then only to the interpreter and not the person sharing their screen? Unfortunately, she is too senior for me to complain about it, but next time, I will be more careful about getting slides from her in advance!

I work for a biotechnology company. The most recent few weeks at work have been EXTREMELY busy — not a moment to sit and think, always running from one fire to another, etc. It’s hectic and crazy, we’re severely understaffed, and everything breaks all the time. We all bring our laptops to meetings because we can’t afford to lose an hour, and we inhale our lunches in five minutes while typing with the other hand.

Our CEO thinks of himself as a cross between God and Socrates. He’s an arrogant a**hole who believes he’s filled with wisdom to impart yet has absolutely no idea how hard everyone is working.

As I was flying between tasks, [CEO] came in with someone I hadn’t seen before.

CEO: “[My Name], this is our new intern, [Intern].”

Me: “Oh, hi, nice to meet you.”

CEO: “She’ll be primarily reporting to you.”

Me: “I’m sorry?”

CEO: “She’ll be here all summer. Please put her to work right away.”

I quickly introduced myself and my team to [Intern], who seemed pleasant and competent enough but knew nothing about the company. As grateful as I was for additional help, bringing on a new person means training, and I sure as heck didn’t have time to give even thirty seconds’ worth of training that day. I thought about having her follow me around just to watch, but most of the craziness that day was happening in the lab, and she wasn’t allowed in the lab without certain safety training that wouldn’t even be available to her until the next week.

So, the result was that I did my best to hand her some papers to read, apologized that I wouldn’t have time to do much training that day, and left her at her desk to start reading. It’s not the way to give someone a stellar first day, but I had emergencies and deadlines all through the afternoon, so I really couldn’t do much else.

Apparently, while I was running between tasks later in the afternoon, [CEO] sauntered in to ask [Intern] how she was getting along. He directly asked her what she was working on at that moment, because that’s the kind of a**hole he is. She had already finished reading what I gave her, so she honestly answered that she had read a couple of papers but had run out of things to do.

Next thing I knew, [CEO] summoned me out of the lab, where I was rushing to meet multiple deadlines, and called me into his office. He sighed, got a contemplative look on his face, and seemed to be gearing up for one of his facetious, self-aggrandizing lectures. Meanwhile, I was so busy that I’d brought paperwork with me TO HIS OFFICE to fill out, and I’m pretty sure I filled out some of it while walking down the hall. A lab timer in my hand was counting down to some other unmissable deadline. In other words, on an afternoon when every second counted, the last thing I needed was to be called into [CEO]’s office.

When I arrived, [Intern] was already sitting there.

CEO: “[My Name], do you know why I’ve been successful in life?”

Me: “Why?”

He pretended to take a few moments to think of the answer. I mean, for f***’s sake.

CEO: “Because when I have people working for me, I always make sure they have something to do. Now, five minutes ago, I asked [Intern] what she was working on, and do you know what she told me?”

He then, at great length, described the scene between himself and [Intern], as well as how appalled he was that he’d hired someone to help me, yet I left her without any work to do. Never mind the fact that he didn’t tell me in advance that he was hiring an intern or the fact that he’d dropped her in my lap on a day when I had no time to train her. In fact, I ended up missing several deadlines and timed events that day because I was stuck in [CEO]’s office, listening to him talk about time management.

I don’t work there anymore. They never understood that if you don’t hire enough people, you’ll be stuck forever in a downward spiral because even the people you have are too busy to train the new people.

This story is a family legend. My grandpa was a big stand-up guy; honesty was the best policy, and if you don’t like the truth, don’t ask him anything that you don’t want answered.

Every year, he did his taxes on time, got his tax return, and went about his day. One year, the IRS decided that computers were the future and began upgrading to electronic tax systems. Keep in mind that this happened somewhere in the early 1960s. Through the headaches of new technology, a blip occurred.

A big blip.

A MILLION-DOLLAR blip!

My grandfather stared at this one-million-dollar tax return check and then tried calling the IRS to report it.

I don’t know the details of the conversation, but the gist of the conversation was:

Grandpa: “I would like to report an error on my tax return. I believe a decimal has to have been misplaced somewhere, or your systems have made a mistake.”

IRS: “We are the IRS. We don’t make mistakes!”

Grandpa: “Well, you cut me a million-dollar check. I promise you that I did not make enough money this year to deserve that size tax return.”

IRS: “We do not make mistakes. If the system says your tax return is a million dollars, then your tax return is a million dollars.”

Grandpa: “You’re an idiot.” *Click*

Grandpa tucked that million dollars in a savings account and didn’t touch it all year, save to put a bit in once a month.

A year later, panic time! Or, well… panic at the IRS, anyway. Practically eating their words, hat in hand, with apologies to a smirking Grandpa, they admitted that they might have indeed made a mistake the previous year and needed the money back.

Perfectly calm, Grandpa wrote them that million-dollar check and told them, “I told that boy he was an idiot.”

A year’s worth of interest remained in Grandpa’s account from that million dollars. That, plus his eventual retirement, helped him build a house and raise his family before he passed away in the early 2000s. We wish we could get that kind of blip again because the interest nowadays would be a heck of a lot higher.

I work for a grocery delivery company. I am not actually an employee of any grocery store. Because of this, whenever I’m working, employees tend to drop their work-persona around me because I am not a “real” customer. I love it.

Deli Employee: “Hi! How can I help you today?” 

Me: “Can I get a pound of this ham—” *shows her the order on my app* “—cut on #2, please?”

The deli employee drops her customer service voice as soon as she sees who I am.

Deli Employee: “The other b**** who was supposed to be up here has a doctor’s appointment and left early. I get that. I get it. But girl, you got a whole a** job; you gotta get someone to cover for you, because look at this s***! I’m back here alone! Do you understand? These b*****es leave me here alone! I was supposed to clock out three hours ago, but ain’t no one came to help me. I’m ‘bout to walk out right now and my manager can’t say nothing. We’re out of most cheese. F*** am I supposed to do about that? If my manager has the audacity to try and chit-chat with me when I clock out, I’m swinging. I don’t care. She can fire me. Everyone’s hiring; I’ll get a new job today.”

She hands me the ham and returns to cheery smiles

Deli Employee: “Thank you, have a good day! Who’s next? Actually, ma’am, we’re out of rotisserie chickens…”

I swear she didn’t take a breath that whole time.