I started getting telemarketer calls for a few days. I blocked one number, and they called again under a different one. They had the same script every single time. Finally, I’d had enough.

My phone’s ringtone is a duck’s quack. The very next time they called, I started quacking like a duck, over and over again. Then, when a live person came on the line:

Me: “Welcome to the dog farm!”

We have five dogs, and I live on a hay farm.

So far, so good; they have not called back. Sometimes a little crazy can go a long way!

I’m a professional chef, and I have been for a few years. In Australia, apprentice chefs are trained in a sort of college where we learn about 150 recipes. Many of the recipes are provided to the students in bulky, finicky booklets that you wouldn’t really want to take anywhere with you, so I started writing some of the recipes in a separate notebook along with some other recipes I’d learned from coworkers or family members. I created a sort of pseudo-cookbook, and I would often bring this book into the kitchen so I would remember ingredient quantities and cooking times. Eventually, I would leave the book in the kitchen pretty much around the clock.

I soon found out that some of the other chefs in the kitchen were using my cookbook to check official recipes for the restaurant we worked for (as typically the head chef would have to tell them and this got annoying for everyone). This restaurant was a part of a popular sports club in the area, so consistency was extremely important to management. Therefore, having a written record of the new recipes or changes to long-time recipes was very important.

As it turned out, management had stopped making changes to the official club recipe book a few months before I even started, so my book had become the de facto official recipe book. For a while, this was no issue to me, and I kept adding new recipes to it throughout the next few years.

However, after my third year working there, I finished my studies and became fully qualified as a chef, so I suddenly became more expensive to keep on as a staff member. Therefore, management started looking for any reason to replace me with a new apprentice.

Eventually, they found someone to replace me and gave a half-a**ed reason for firing me and told me:

Management: “Take all your things and leave. You can no longer offer what we are looking for.”

So, I took everything I owned — including the notebook with all the club’s recipes — and left.

For a few days, not a whole lot happened, but slowly, the club’s reviews started complaining about bland food, dry cakes, inconsistent classic recipes, and every other food-related thing you could think of. At one point, there were fifty negative reviews in a single day. For our town, that was a massive amount in one day. It felt pretty d*** good since I felt they deserved it and left me unemployed on short notice. However, I was quickly offered a new job by a smaller restaurant whose owner knew me from the sports club kitchen.

After about a week, I received multiple calls. I answered one, and it was one of the higher managers from the sports club.

Manager: “Could you return the recipe book? The kitchen needs it back.”

I laughed but replied firmly:

Me: “It’s my book full of my recipes, so it isn’t going anywhere near you. I’ll remind you that you told me I ‘could no longer offer what you were looking for.’”

The manager clearly began to panic; he offered to give me my job back and “just let bygones be bygones”. I already had a new job, so I completely brushed off this offer and ignored him. I hung up pretty soon after that.

I started putting the recipes from my book on the new restaurant’s menu, and it began to attract a few regular customers of the sports club, so I quickly found myself with more and more responsibility and command within the kitchen. It got to the point where about a third of the menu was from my book.

This slow trickle of sports club regulars picked up speed after about three months and led to several high-level managers from the club deciding to visit the restaurant I’d helped build. They basically demanded I give them my cookbook, claiming it would be much more beneficial for the community if they had it. My head chef laughed in their faces and told them to piss off.

It’s been about two years. My head chef and I have a very positive relationship, and the customer base we have at the restaurant is better than ever.

We didn’t take every customer from the big club, but it was enough damage to their profits to scare a few investors away, and it caused a decent bit of damage to one of the higher managers’ reputations. Furthermore, the recipe issues and negative reviews led to the majority of the kitchen quitting. According to one of my old colleagues, they cited the lack of support and organisation from upper management as the final reasons everyone was quitting, and this led to an even larger dip in the quality of the restaurant food.

I also get paid significantly more at this restaurant than I did at the sports club.

I recently got to nuke a former manager’s chances at my new job.

I used to work at a now-defunct bookstore chain, and a new manager was transferred into ours. All the employees believed that she was intentionally transferred there to tank our (previously well-performing) store so corporate could justify closing that location down. 

[Manager] drove away half the old-timers who had been there for years and knew what they were doing. She often took several hour-long lunch breaks. In an eight-hour shift, her record was four breaks. She also often left the store when there were no other managers on shift.

Three-quarters of our cafe staff quit (including me) after [Manager] fired the cafe manager over a minor incident. We all went in at the same time to submit our two-week resignation notice, and she swept everything off her desk in a rage. The result was a very heavy stapler hitting the wall hard enough to leave a dent. She had a screaming meltdown at all of us.

Immediately, our two-week notice became “effective immediately,” and we all gathered our things, punched out, and left. The entire time, we were serenaded by [Manager] growing increasingly more vile and personal in her freak-out.

A year or two later, I worked as an assistant manager for a competing chain.

General Manager: “By any chance did you work with [Manager] at [Former Location]? She’s applying for a management position with our company.”

I explained everything above, and then I added:

Me: “If you bring her on board, you will have my immediate resignation on your desk before the end of the day.”

Another coworker who had worked for her a few years before me at another location said the same.

Thankfully, the general manager took us seriously, and [Manager] was not brought on board. The sad part is that with people like her, you don’t even have to exaggerate; just telling the truth is enough to make any smart employer toss their resume.

I worked at a pub that was attached to and served the menu of a chain restaurant next door. The restaurant was known for breakfast and greasy food. The owner was an… interesting man. He was extremely strict, and if you were new or a customer watching the interaction, he would be seen as horribly rude. Thankfully, he didn’t care about the business whatsoever, and we would rarely see him.

[Owner]’s attitude made servers come and go in droves; I think there were only three long-timers. I was originally hired on for the pub side only due to my extensive bartending experience, but due to mass quitting, I got tasked with working the dreaded Sunday morning shift one week.

Between 6:00 am and 10:00 am, everyone was mostly friendly and left good tips, but once churches let out, all Hell broke loose — no pun intended. The churchgoers were the most hypocritical of all people; repent and ask for forgiveness, then come and scream at waitstaff making minimum wage, let their kids make horrible messes, and sit for an hour and a half even though they saw the lineup out the door for a table. And 99% of the time, they’d leave no tip — or they’d leave a note or pamphlet about how I was going to Hell, smeared with strawberry sauce that their kid splattered in a five-foot radius around the table.

I grew to like the early morning regulars, and I was the only person who volunteered for the weekend mornings at that point.

One glorious Sunday, I clocked in and saw [Owner]. Uh-oh. Both the manager and assistant manager, scheduled to serve that morning alongside me and one other server, called in sick. Due to [Owner]’s INCREDIBLE cheapness and distrust of us “peasants”, only the manager had a PIN to do discounts on orders — including for the fifty variations of coupons [Owner] sent out in flyers, newspapers, and online ads to try and drum up business. Yes, a manager was on call or physically in the building between 6:00 am and 2:00 am closing time. Absurd.

On top of that, there was a hockey tournament happening, so we had four reservations for tables of fifteen, PLUS the regular church reservations (five tables of six), PLUS the regular walk-ins. It was going to be insanity.

So, here was [Owner], rolling up the sleeves on his $295 shirt — yes, he told us how much it cost after he spilled jam on it — looking like he was going to work. Thankfully, the other server and I were rockstars and were doing pretty well, to the point that [Owner] decided he could expedite in the kitchen rather than interact with the lowly customers… until orders that normally took fifteen to eighteen minutes to come out were taking upwards of thirty to forty-five!

I went back to see what was going on when I had a minute to breathe, and I saw LITERALLY fifty-plus slices of toast on the counter, twenty-plus plates dying in the window, and [Owner] red in the face and dripping sweat all over everything.

Me: “[Owner], what’s going on? Why haven’t you called me or [Server] for pick-ups?! And what’s with the toast?”

Owner: “I know what the f*** I’m doing. I’m the owner, not you.”

Me: “Okay… Not what I asked, but all right. Can I get some of these out?”

Owner: “No! I tell you when to take them. Don’t you ever try to do something without being told!”

Me: “‘Kay.”

I walked away and continued apologizing to my tables for the delays. Thankfully, most people were understanding, but it definitely took a toll on morale in the restaurant. Another ten minutes or so went by, and I still hadn’t been called to drop food. [Server] came running up to me with a panicked look on his face.

Server: “[My Name], oh, my God… Please. Do something.”

What had been fifty-plus slices of toast had now become THREE four-foot-tall piles of various types of bread, toasted and now stale, piled up on the counter. The plates that had been under the warmer were now flooding every flat surface, and the window was full again.

I started checking plates and calling out remakes, and then I felt a hard bump right on my spine.

Me: “Ouch! What the h***?!”

[Owner] had just jabbed me with the corner of one of the square plates.

Owner: “I SAID I GOT THIS! GET OUT!”

The restaurant fell silent as everyone heard that, and almost everyone was now focused intently on the doors to the kitchen 

Me: “[Owner], this is insane. Table thirteen has been waiting an hour for bacon and eggs! Please just go to the office and let me sort this out!”

Owner: “F*** YOU, STUPID B****! I NEVER SHOULD HAVE HIRED YOU, F****** KNOW-IT-ALL! I. AM. THE. OWNER. I WILL ALWAYS HAVE MORE EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE THAN SOME DUMB SLUT WAITRESS! IF I TELL YOU TO F*** OFF, IT MEANS F*** OFF AND GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN!”

I stood shocked for a moment. Then, I took off my apron, tossed it on the ground, and started collecting my belongings from my locker to leave. [Server] followed behind me, as did two of the cooks and the dishwasher.

As we made our way out of the kitchen, [Owner] continued screaming, swearing, and hurling insults at us all. Slowly but surely, tables of shocked patrons got up and followed behind us, loudly proclaiming how they’d leave bad reviews and post in the community groups about what they had witnessed and how [Restaurant] had gone downhill since [Owner] bought it six years prior.

The community groups were full of almost exclusively posts about [Restaurant] for the next week. Their Google rating went from a 4.6 to a 2.8 within that same amount of time, with only friends of [Owner] leaving positive reviews and comments in the Facebook groups, calling all of us who’d walked out “entitled brats who haven’t worked a day of real work in their lives”.

Eight other staff members (five servers and three cooks) quit that week after hearing what had happened. [Owner] was down to three front-of-house employees (a manager, an assistant manager, and one server who was a relative of his) and only one back-of-house employee. He left me a voicemail saying more horrible things, begged me to come back halfway through, and ended it with more insults and comments about how I’d never amount to anything in life.

A decade later, I own a successful business in the same town, and [Owner] is riding off of investors’ money and begging for customers, but everyone remembers what he is!

The apartment complex I live in is over fifty years old — and so is its plumbing. We’re in the middle of a total renovation of all the plumbing in every apartment and with that, completely new bathrooms. We get to choose from a standard offering of tiles and furniture for our new bathrooms. If the existing bathroom is less than ten years old, there is also the option — for free — to restore features outside the standard. In my case, it’s a full-length mirror framed by the same tiles as on the floor (which is a four-color checkerboard). The rest of wall is white tiles.

The project manager discusses solutions with me and makes 2D and 3D drawings of my new bathroom, including the mirror. (Recreating the floor would extend the work by a week, so I say no to that.) I have once again chosen white tiles for the wall, expecting a frame of black ones (the floor tiles) around my mirror.

The renovation for each apartment takes five weeks, during which we have no indoor plumbing, so I have found temporary accommodation elsewhere. Before I leave, I notice that the workers themselves have taped printouts of the 3D drawing to my main door to refer to while they work. 

I go home once or twice a week to pick up mail and check on progress. On the Saturday at the end of week four, I see that they have tiled the bathroom. And there is no mirror. The wall it is supposed to be on is just the big white tiles. I email the project manager and include my photos of the bathroom wall and the drawing on the door, asking if it is too late to fix this.

On Monday, a slightly panicked and very apologetic master bricklayer calls me. We discuss solutions and arrive at a compromise. He can get the mirror itself in place, but he cannot do the special tile framing around it. I’m happy I’m at least getting the mirror, so I agree. 

Master Bricklayer: “Do you have the perspective drawing for the mirror?”

Me: “…You mean the one hanging on my door?”

I could practically hear him blushing when he realized what he’d asked.

I’m sure the work week started with a lot of yelling, but I now have a mirror.