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.

In my early twenties, I worked in a cell phone store in a strip mall. The store was an authorized dealer for a national, growing cellular provider. As an authorized dealer, my store could not do all the same things as a “corporate” store of the cellular provider, despite most of our branding looking identical.

As employees of the authorized dealer, we were sales agents, and our main focus was on selling phones, service, and accessories. Anything beyond that — warranty claims or exchanges, in-depth troubleshooting, most account maintenance, etc. — had to be handled at a corporate store. This often resulted in confused and/or frustrated customers.

One day, an elderly woman came in with an old flip phone that was no longer working properly. She needed it fixed or replaced. Upon looking up the woman’s account information, we discovered that she had obtained this phone several years ago, and as such, it was out of warranty. However, she wasn’t eligible for an upgrade, either; this was back in the days of two-year contracts, and she always gave her upgrades to the other family members on her account.

Unfortunately, this meant that she didn’t have many options apart from adding a new line of service to her account (which would significantly impact her monthly bill) or purchasing a phone “outright” at full retail price. She couldn’t afford (and didn’t want) anything fancy, and although smartphones weren’t around yet, most of the phones we carried were “feature phones” with things like QWERTY keyboards or fancy cameras. We only had a couple of “basic” models, and even then, the full retail price for those was at least $200.

I’ve always been service-oriented more than anything else, and the rest of the employees in my store — and even many of those from other stores in the region — knew me to be a very honest person who hated taking advantage of anyone just to make a sale. I really wanted to do everything I could to help this woman, so I grabbed a cheap pre-paid flip phone out of our stock room and explained to the customer that although it was marked for pre-paid service, we had a workaround that would allow us to activate it on her post-paid plan.

Technically, this wasn’t allowed under the authorized dealer contract we had with the cellular carrier, but it was a common tactic that we somehow managed to get away with for quite some time. An important caveat of selling a customer a pre-paid phone is that the sales representative doing the sale got virtually no commission from it unless they convinced the customer to purchase some additional accessories. I wasn’t invested in this particular transaction for the money.

The customer seemed a bit confused about the whole process — she wasn’t very tech-savvy or even fully understanding of how her service was set up in the first place — but decided to purchase the pre-paid phone and a phone case on clearance. (Read: still little commission for me.) My assistant manager helped me activate the phone in the system, and the elderly woman left the store with a working phone.

Alas, that didn’t last.

The woman came back the next day, complaining that the phone was dropping calls, failing to connect when she tried to place calls, etc. A coworker and I did some basic troubleshooting but to no avail. Pre-paid phones were often older post-paid phones that had been refurbished (poorly), and I suspected that this was the case with this phone, although I didn’t voice that concern to the customer. We encouraged her to visit the corporate store about three miles away, and this only furthered her confusion about the whole situation. Eventually, she conceded and left for the corporate store.

A bit later that day, we got a call from a representative at the corporate store, who asked us a number of questions about the phone and how and why it had been sold to this poor, frustrated woman. Despite my assistant manager’s explanations, the other store’s rep seemed convinced that we had sold the customer the pre-paid phone illegitimately in order to scam her out of her money, and they hung up.

I don’t know what the corporate store did to assist the woman, apart from somehow getting her a (different) working phone and sending her back to my store to return the pre-paid phone and case.

When she walked in the door, she was visibly angry, although calm, and she marched up to the sales counter and spoke to my assistant manager, who happened to be standing right next to me. She politely asked to return the phone and the case, and my assistant manager complied. Neither of them said much during the short transaction. Once the return was complete and the customer was assured that her money had been refunded to her debit card, she thanked the assistant manager and then turned to me and looked me in the eye.

Customer: “And you, young man. Shame on you, taking advantage of naive customers like me. You shouldn’t be allowed to keep working here with your unscrupulous sales tactics. I don’t know how you sleep at night.”

Keep in mind that I had made next to nothing on the sale.

While she was speaking, I maintained eye contact with her and waited a moment to be sure she was done. I then simply nodded my head and said, “Okay.”

This seemed to fluster the woman, whose expression passed through confusion and then further anger before she huffed and quickly left the store.

As soon as the door had shut behind the customer, my assistant manager burst out laughing at a customer telling me — who would rather take a punch to the face than be unkind to anyone, ever — “I don’t know how you sleep at night.”

To this day, I still appreciate him for recognizing how ludicrous that was and for making me feel better about myself.

I work at a dog salon part-time (I’m a full-time student), and I often schedule new appointments for clients. We have a lot of clients who specifically need Saturdays because they work all day and we close pretty early — like between 3:00 and 4:00 — so we tend to have the same groups of dogs every five or six weeks.

Yesterday, we had the normal doodle and corgi group — as we call it because we have a lot of doodles and an adorable corgi — but with an added Yorkie. I personally bathed this Yorkie and she was a doll. She was perfectly behaved and let me do basically whatever (except nails, but we expect that from Yorkies).

When the “mom” showed up to pick up the Yorkie after her groom, I happened to be free and went to check them out.

Me: “Do you need another appointment booked?”

Customer: “Yes, six weeks out.”

Me: “Do you need a Saturday?”

Customer: “No, I need a Friday.”

Me: “Okay. Need a specific time?”

Customer: “First thing in the morning.”

Me: “Okay, 8:00… It appears the date we’re looking at is booked in the morning, but we can go a week before or after if you really need a Friday.”

Customer: “What does [Boss/Owner] have in the morning?”

Me: “Looks like a Shih Tzu.”

That happens to be my dog, but I don’t tell her that.

Customer: “Well, that Shih Tzu can wait. My precious Bella needs that appointment!”

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t just reschedule a dog’s appointment. This person happens to schedule appointments throughout the entire year, so he’s had it since December.”

I know this because, again, it’s my dog and my grandpa makes the appointments.

Customer: *Getting louder* “I don’t care! I want that spot!”

At this point, one of my coworkers came out to see if I needed any help. I have very bad anxiety, so this lady yelling at me was causing me to visibly shake and I was close to having a panic attack. [Coworker] saw this and said she’d take over and whispered for me to get our boss.

I did, and then I went into the bathroom to quietly freak out and hyperventilate in peace. My boss ended up scheduling the woman out for five weeks and telling her that if she ever yelled at one of her team members again, she’d have no choice but to blacklist the woman. My boss knows I have bad anxiety, and she’s absolutely amazing.

Moral of the story: don’t be an a** to a small business owner and expect to get your way.

CONTENT WARNING: This story contains content of a legal nature. It is not intended as legal advice.

I’m a lawyer. A client comes in with a seemingly simple auto collision. The client was hit, and the other driver got out and said something like, “Oh, my God, are you okay? I’m so sorry! I dropped my phone and reached to get it…” The client had a dashcam that recorded the whole thing, including the admission of guilt. Easy client, right?

It turns out that the admission was really important because the type of accident didn’t make a “determination of fault” easy. (Imagine a rear-end collision at a red light as an easy determination, but a collision at a four-way stop sign as a hard determination.) When the cops showed up, the police report found both drivers at fault AND did not mention any statements from the other driver.

But we have our admission, and my client’s damages are above the other guy’s policy limit. So, I send a demand to the insurance company for policy limits. Note that the insurance company has an obligation to negotiate in good faith, which becomes important later.

The lawyer from insurance reaches out and says (basically):

Insurance Attorney: “Look, my client says they were driving safely, and the police report says shared fault.”

The initial offer is like ten grand.

Me: “Yeah, but my client had a dashcam and it recorded your client admitting fault.”

It’s important to understand that this is before dashcams are common. It isn’t my first case with a dashcam, but it might be my third or fourth. No mention of the dashcam was made on the police report.

The insurance attorney says (I imagine while twirling a dumb mustache):

Insurance Attorney: “Interesting, can you send me a copy of the video?”

I say sure and send it over.

Insurance Attorney: “I can’t open this!”

I send him a link to VLC Media Player.

Me: “It’s a weird extension, and Windows Media Player won’t play it. But VLC will. Just follow the installer instructions and it should play with no problem.”

Insurance Attorney: “I’m not installing something to watch your alleged dash cam video. Send me a file I can play if you want me to consider it.”

This makes me unhappy, but I try again.

Me: “It will take less than a few minutes to install, and then you can watch the video and listen to your client admit fault.”

Insurance Attorney: “We are done here until you send something I can play.”

Cue malicious compliance music: “Country Grammar”. Start a super cool montage of me going through other client files. Stop the montage as I open a file and my face is bathed in a golden light radiating from an old Memorex CD.

I’ve found a DIFFERENT dashcam video that does not contain any sound but can be played with Windows Media Player, AND it is close enough to my current client’s facts that if you weren’t paying attention, it could pass. [Insurance Attorney] just asked for “a file” he could play, right?

I send it over.

Insurance Attorney: “Wow, no sound. Guess you’re done, buddy.”

So, I sue. During discovery, I send a CD over which included the ORIGINAL video AND a copy of VLC. He must ignore it because he doesn’t say anything about it.

During a pretrial motion hearing, I play the video for the judge. The judge might have heard the other lawyer’s jaw hit his desk.

Insurance Attorney: “Your honor, this is not the video he sent to me!”

In my mind’s eye, I see the malicious compliance death star preparing to fire.

Me: “Judge, I thought he might say that. Here is a copy of our emails where I described the video, provided the video, and sent instructions on how to play it. Here is a copy of the CD I sent with discovery, which also has the video and a copy of VLC. Finally, here is a copy of the unrelated video which I sent to fulfill his request for ‘something he could play’.”

[Insurance Attorney] asked for a recess. Because he refused the initial demand of policy limits, I told him I would argue that he did not negotiate in good faith. We settled for well above policy limits. The client was very happy.