I’ve been at this job of tech support for about six to eight months now. My supervisor likes the numbers I put up, taking a lot of calls and closing a lot of tickets. I make the other Tier 1 techs look bad because of my metrics.

I get into work one day and my supervisor comes up to me and says he’s getting flack from upper management about all the unnecessary open tickets we have. He wants me to go through this list of over 100 tickets and call out to the customers and work them. He says that is my task for the day and to only take inbound calls when I’m finished with this list or if he asks me to help. Across the list are a lot of easy tickets — basically, ones you know are resolved, but you need the customer’s confirmation that the issue is resolved before you close the ticket.

I log into the ticket system and start opening up all the tickets on my list. This takes a little while, and then I start going through the tickets one by one. I call each store location and see whether the issue in the ticket has been resolved or not, and if it hasn’t been, I work with the customer.

I’ve been at the task for about half the day now and I’m close to finishing. Lunchtime comes around and a few of the Tier 1 techs leave to take their lunch. I finish up my work around the time the first group of Tier 1 techs returns from lunch.

All of a sudden, behind me, one of the more irritating people in our group (he’s loud and bossy and complains constantly to management) blurts out:

Coworker: “Who’s AM? Whose initials are AM? They closed a ticket I had opened. I was going to call the customer back after I finished lunch.”

Me: “That’s me. What’s the ticket number?”

Coworker: “Why did you close my ticket? I had it opened first. It was my ticket. I was going to call the customer.”

Me: “The only tickets I worked on were from the list given to me. If I closed a ticket you had grabbed, it was because I was working through the list our supervisor gave me.”

Coworker: “It was MY TICKET!”

[Coworker] is getting loud now and he’s starting to draw attention with his little temper tantrum. What this current situation has come down to is that this coworker grabbed a bunch of these easy tickets so he could pad his numbers; he wanted simple callback tickets where he could just ask the customer if the issue was resolved and then close the ticket. He’s mad because he can’t easily pad his metrics now.

Me: “I did the work I was told. Let it go. We’re working together here for the company.”

Coworker: “I had the ticket first! It was MY TICKET!”

I’ve finally had enough of his temper tantrums and I snap.

Me: “I don’t give a s*** if you grabbed the ticket. It was on my list. I went through this list as I was instructed and I worked on resolving issues for the company. I’m tired of listening to you whine. Shut up! No one wants to hear your baby temper tantrums anymore!”

Coworker: *Quietly, under his breath* “It was my ticket.”

Me: “Shut up. I don’t want to hear it anymore.”

Coworker: *Even more quietly, almost a whisper* “But it was my ticket.”

Me: “It wasn’t your ticket. It was a company ticket. The ticket was resolved and closed. Drop it.”

At least from that day out, my coworker hasn’t thrown his baby temper tantrums anymore.

About a year ago, my mom and I were coming home from a long road trip, and we were about a city away from our house, so about two hours. We were hungry so we stopped at a fast food drive-thru.

While we’re waiting in this huge line, this guy comes speeding into the parking lot, which is basically empty, and parks in an accessible space. There are at least twenty other non-accessible spaces. We look at his licence plate; it’s not new, and there’s no sticker on there. We look through his windows from our car, and there’s no tag hanging from his rearview mirror.

Then this guy in his twenties gets out with a car full of other twenty-something guys, none of whom seem to be having any trouble walking, and they start heading for the inside. My mom rolls down her window and shouts at them.

Mom: “Hey, those spaces are for people who, you know, are disabled?!“

The driver turned back, flipped her the bird, and kept walking.

Well, my mom wasn’t having any of this, so she had me call parking enforcement and take a picture of this car. Parking enforcement came, and instead of giving the guy a ticket, the officer had him towed.

The driver came running out, swearing on his mother that his best friend was disabled and that he had just forgotten the tag. One of the guys, who’d had no trouble walking earlier, came out, very dramatically limping.

The parking officer looked into their records, and surprise, surprise, none of them were disabled or even related to anyone disabled. They both got tickets, as well as the main dude getting his car towed.

My mom and I were sitting in our car eating our food watching this whole thing go down, thinking it was hilarious Karma.

When my friends and I got our driver’s licenses, we were very cautious drivers in our neighborhood. There were lots of kids playing, and they were always running in and out of the street, so we were overly cautious and drove slow.

Posted sporadically throughout the neighborhood were speed limit signs of 25 mph. My friends and I usually went maybe 20 mph because we’d had a couple of kids pop out in the street right in front of us a few times, as a ball would go bouncing into the street and a kid would just run right out after it. We didn’t have any accidents, but a pizza delivery driver did; a kid ran out from behind a parked car chasing a ball and the kid got hit and almost died. My friends and I didn’t want to be in that situation, so we always went slower in the neighborhood.

Most adults, on the other hand, would drive through the neighborhood going 30 mph or more, not stopping fully at stop signs, and not slowing down when kids were outside playing. Cops used to park down the road from some of the four-way-stop intersections, and they’d constantly get adults pulled over for not stopping. It was sad, but also funny because my friend’s mom got a ticket for rolling through the stop signs.

A few doors down from my house, there was an older man (probably around sixty or so) who would yell at the teenagers as they drove by. He would tell us we were driving too fast and we needed to slow down. It was a constant thing. He’d walk to the edge of his yard, waving his cane and yelling at kids to drive slower, but when an adult went speeding down the street, he never caused a scene with them. It may be possible that he thought some of the kids were driving fast because a couple of friends of mine had aftermarket exhaust and headers on their cars and they were overly loud. Maybe the old man mistook the loud cars for going fast even when they weren’t?

I grew tired of his tirades one day and I barked at him. My friend was in the front passenger seat and I had just backed out of my driveway. The old man’s house was three doors down, on the opposite side of the road that I lived on. My car was nothing special, and even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could get my car past 30 mph in that short of a distance. But, as I was doing maybe 10 mph when I started to approach his house, here came the old man, hobbling across his yard, waving his cane, and yelling at us.

Old Man: “Slow down! You’re going too fast! You kids always drive too fast! SLOW DOWN!”

Having a manual, I just put the car in neutral, opened my door, and stepped out of the car. I looked the old guy in the eyes as I started to push my car…

Me: “Is this better? Should I just get out and push my f****** car? Would this make you happy? How about you shut the f*** up and yell at the parents that tear a** through the streets and not the kids that actually drive slow?”

The old man didn’t say anything back. He just hobbled back to his porch and never yelled at us again. I guess the old man was too chicken to yell at adults and he must have felt like a bigshot yelling at teenagers.

I am buying snacks at a supermarket grocery store late one night after work, in a part of town infamous for its entitled and out-of-touch attitude. I am next in line at the only open manned register and there is another line at the self-checkouts. A young adult woman and her friend with a few things in hand get in front of me and look up at me with puppy-dog eyes.

Keep in mind there are several people also waiting behind me.

Customer: “We only have a few things. We can cut in front of you, right?”

Me: “Umm… why?”

Customer: “We didn’t, like, expect to have to wait.”

Me: “Oh. Then, no.”

I walked around her to place my two items on the belt. Her expression told me she was not used to hearing that one. They got in line.

This story was told to me by one of the participants. There is a lot of background and associated internal politics and policies that I’ll not go into for the sake of brevity.

In a Japanese private hospital in the 1990s, there is a doctor — let’s call him Dr. Painful — who firmly believes that all painkillers, and especially the stronger opiates available, are not necessary and are even harmful. He either doesn’t prescribe any or seriously under-prescribes. Despite protests from the nurses and other doctors, he persists in this belief. His direct management, as well as their manager, are spineless toadies who refuse to overrule this doctor’s decisions, and his colleagues aren’t allowed to directly interfere.

One day, a patient is admitted claiming extreme pain in the abdomen. Dr. Painful claims it can’t possibly be that bad and predictably refuses to prescribe sufficient painkillers. This woman is crying in pain, but he won’t budge, despite the protests of the patient, the nurses, and other doctors. Finally, one of the nurses loses it and jumps several levels of management to browbeat the director into taking action.

Another doctor from a different department overhears this conversation and volunteers to take the patient for an MRI, where they discover a cancerous growth. Yes, its location would cause extreme pain. At this point, the patient’s mother has already moved the patient to another hospital, so there’s no follow-up. The nurse is reprimanded for daring to jump over direct management, despite an acknowledgment that nothing would have happened had she not done so. Nothing happens to Dr. Painful, as far as anyone knows.

Sometime later, Dr. Painful is admitted to that same hospital for a hernia. He’s in a lot of pain. The doctor he’s assigned to writes his prescription, quote: “Dr. Painful special treatment: no pain medication.” Dr. Painful is crying in pain and begging for painkillers, but the nurses and the other doctors refuse to give him any. He is shown the prescription, saying that he’s receiving the same treatment he gives to his own patients, and they wouldn’t want to insult him by doing anything different. They quote him at every turn, using his own excuses against him each time he asks. Lucky for him, the hernia is shortly resolved and he’s discharged.

Dr. Painful never stinted on painkillers after that episode. Seems pain can teach empathy after all.