My wife and I are flying to Scotland for my cousin’s wedding. We are behind the emergency exit row on the plane. There is an older couple in front of us, and the woman is holding a plant.

Attendant: “I’m sorry, madam, but you’ll need to put your plant in the overhead locker. This is the emergency exit row.”

Woman: “I can’t put my plant up there. It might get damaged.”

Attendant: “Then I will need you to move seats.”

Woman: “But I don’t want to move seats.”

Attendant: “Then the plant needs to go in the overhead locker.”

And so the merry-go-round continues. I cannot emphasize enough that the only thing holding up this flight is a plant and a stubborn jerk.

Me: “Excuse me. Sorry for interrupting, but can I hold the plant?”

Attendant: *Clearly grateful* “Thank you, sir.”

I am reluctantly handed this time-wasting weed for take-off and landing. I firmly resist turning it into a hat for the lady.

On arrival in Scotland…

Woman: “Thank you for that. It’s quite a rare orchid, you know.”

Such a rare specimen, flying in a supermarket carrier bag on a UK budget airline — must be rarer than rocking horse manure considering its luxurious journey.

I was a sergeant in my law enforcement field, and one of my officers was about as useful as a soup sandwich. He was young and ridiculous. He thought he was God’s gift to our field.

Let me preface this by saying that, as a supervisor, I would bend over backward to help people IF they came to me and communicated. I found out very quickly that this kid was beyond any help. He had intermittent FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) — a labor law that requires us to provide employees with job-protected, unpaid leave for accepted medical and family issues — which, in my state and country, is a big deal. They are almost untouchable… Almost.

This kid pissed me off so badly that I went out of my way to hem him up. At first, it was small. He would use his leave to take days off for his “medical issue.” Okay, that’s fine. I get it. However, I very rapidly saw a pattern. His “issue” seemed to flair up only on weekends — Friday or Monday — so he would constantly have three-day weekends. Then, I’d see him on social media posting club pics with lovely captions like “Bottles and hoes” or “#PoppinBottles”. Yeah, he was that guy.

Now, granted, thanks to privacy laws we never knew what “issues” employees were having, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of one single issue that would specifically flair up on a Friday morning and be okay by club time. (I’ve Googled, and [Medical Site] gives no specific cause… except maybe cancer, because it’s always cancer, am I right?)

So, I started paying attention and took screenshots of all of his lovely excursions to the late-night pharmacy of loud music, girls, and liquid medications. Over time, I realized that in an average forty-hour work week, he maybe — maybe — worked fifteen hours. I took a whole weekend and mathematically broke down his time spent at work by percentage and highlighted every time he called in.

It took some time and convincing, but FMLA be d***ed, I got that kid fired. I think the pie chart is what finally did him in.

He tried to sue me and the department later but I never got a summons and never heard anything about it again. Pop that bottle, jerk.

I work in a small engineering office with six others, although only two were there when this happened. If things are quiet and no one is on the phone, it’s normal for someone to whistle a bit or maybe start quietly singing to themselves. No one minds.

It was getting late in the afternoon, and I think my coworker needed to hit his silly quota for the day, to the tune of a song from a certain musical about a wannabe nun from Austria.

Coworker #1: *Singing* “How do you solve a problem like diarrhoea?”

I burst out laughing.

Coworker #1: “You like that, then, [My Name]?”

Me: “Brilliant! If they put that on in the West End, that show would run and run!”

[Coworker #1] and [Coworker #2] responded with a mix of laughing and groaning.

When I worked in security in my early twenties, I got placed at a top-secret site. The guards there were all long-timers since it was a higher pay level due to the security clearance requirement. The site had two sections, and after I had been there for a couple of years, I got transferred to the second one around the corner. I joined my new shift and met my shift supervisor and the other patrol guard.

We were on a twelve-hour rotating shift. We worked twelve hours a day for a total of seven days in a fourteen-day period, and then we switched day/night. So, it was two weeks of days and then two weeks of nights, over and over. It was stressful, and sometimes your shift-mates were the only people you’d talk to for days at a time on nights.

Enter [Coworker]. [Coworker] had been working at that site for probably six years at that point. He was a white guy in his early forties.

[Coworker] was a bigot. If you could find a difference between two people, [Coworker] hated one of the options. He would go on hours-long rants about “foreigners stealing jobs” or “effing [Language]-speaking people,” etc., etc., etc.

Oddly enough, it was always said matter-of-factly, not with rage. He’d spout racist nonsense with people of that race in the room, or sexist BS in front of women, but it was not directed specifically at them. He created a toxic pall of negative energy around him, and no one could get him to shut up. And because the company was all old-guard-type people, he got ignored instead of being called out.

For instance: one Christmas Eve, I was on the night shift with my shift supervisor, a sweet lady who happens to be a [Language] speaker and a lesbian. I’m a young woman, not ex-military, and I also speak [Language]. We were sitting together before our shift started.

Supervisor: “[My Name], I can’t take [Coworker]’s rants tonight, not tonight of all nights.”

Me: “Me, neither. I’m not spending Christmas Eve listening to his BS.”

[Coworker] came in and we sat watching the TV, waiting for our patrol time to start.

Coworker: “I can’t believe our company is hiring so many [racial slur], [LGBT slur] [Language]-speaking women who’ve never been in the military. It’s—”

Supervisor & Me: “[Coworker]!”

I stopped and let her continue since she was our boss.

Supervisor: “No, no, I am not sitting here all night listening to you talk like that. If you can’t talk about the weather or sports, I don’t want to hear it. Okay?”

[Coworker] was stunned, and he didn’t say a single word for the rest of the night that wasn’t about work. It was glorious.

I had to work with [Coworker] for two years, until one day he was telling a racist joke to an employee (probably against their will) and the CEO was walking down the hall behind him. [CEO] was pissed. He went to our big boss.

CEO: “I want that guy gone — yesterday.”

Then, when he saw [Coworker] the next day because the company was trying to find him a new site the CEO went back to the big boss.

CEO: “When I said, ‘gone,’ I meant ‘gone.’ His access to the site is revoked. He’s not allowed here ever again.”

After that, it was a lot more peaceful on our shift.

When I worked at a restaurant and gift store chain, there was a wide selection of useless or annoying people, but it was incredibly hard to get fired from that store because we were always short-handed and overworked. The one time that I DID see someone get fired, let me tell you, it was a trip.

[Coworker] was one of those twenty-somethings that never grew out of their “thirteen-year-old’s idea of a cool popular guy” phase. He HATED to do real work. And he probably also hated me, to be honest, because I was the defacto dishwasher lead and helped run the shift and make sure everything ran smoothly. (This included training, correcting, and telling people to get into certain positions.)

It was a busy Mother’s Day, and we were all running on all cylinders, every position filled and busy. Even the managers were hopping on the cooking line and running dishes around the kitchen. [Coworker], as usual, kept disappearing off and on, but none of the rest of us could be bothered doing more than snapping at him to get this or that. We just put him on the window (putting dishes and pans where they go to replenish the cooks’ utensils) where he could be useless somewhere else, out of the way, since the rest of us working was much more put-together and could make short work of actually cleaning the dishes.

[Coworker] was getting impatient because it was nearing the end of his shift, so I guess he pestered a few managers about leaving, but they told him to clear the window that was overflowing with dishes and to wait until two dishwashers finished taking out the trash. [Coworker] stormed off. The window was soon overrun with dishes (again) and the line was empty of dishes (again), so the actual shift leader and I jumped on that to quickly replenish everything. We complained back and forth about how we had both been chasing [Coworker] around all day to get any kind of work done. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him: sneaking around the server area, grabbing a drink, and darting AWAY from the dish room.

Now, I can have quite a loud voice if I’m not careful about it, which catches most people off-guard because I’m pretty reserved. But I also did JROTC and honed a nice, crisp drill sergeant voice. So, having enough of this nonsense, I shouted over the noise of the kitchen: 

Me: “[COWORKER]!”

The dude jumped like a mile. He stormed back over and I spoke in a more normal voice.

Me: “Help [Shift Lead] clear the window.”

He clearly didn’t like not having the last word, and he snapped:

Coworker: “I don’t like being yelled at!

I fired back out of reflex:

Me: “Then do your job!

He stormed off, theoretically putting things away. The shift lead said something to him that apparently made him mad, so he decided to body-check the shift lead. In clear view of the cook’s line. Which the GENERAL MANAGER was on.

[Coworker] was asked to leave and not to come back.

Right after [Coworker] stormed off, the dishwashers came back from taking the trash out. That meant that if [Coworker] had done literally anything different in the two minutes he was at the dish room window, he probably wouldn’t have been fired.

The next day, one of the managers I work with often was with me on the evening shift, and she disclosed to me that [Coworker] was scheduled to work, so if he came in, I needed to direct him to her so she could tell him that he was, indeed, fired. His clock-in time came and went without anything happening, so we just shrugged and went on with our lives.

The guy came in AN HOUR later, asking why he couldn’t clock in. The little old lady manager said:

Manager: “Because you were fired! And even if you weren’t, you’re an HOUR late!”

Some of the line cooks were snickering about “Then do your job!” for the next couple of days.