I happened to move shortly before the health crisis hit, and as a result, the job I had lined up fell through. Now, a year later, I’ve begun working a job that I am frankly overqualified for. I have previously had jobs as a welder and machinist before becoming a team lead in the workshop I was in, and then I worked as a production engineer in an electronics factory. 

Now, I am an assistant in the shop of a college that teaches manufacturing technology. I am not an instructor; instead, I am responsible for inventory and maintenance tasks, managing the tools and equipment, tracking what is being used, repairing tools or ordering new ones if things break, signing out machines and tools for the students who come in to work on their projects, and making sure they are in good shape when the students are finished.

It should be noted that I am a relatively small woman and am no stranger to some coworkers initially not taking me seriously in industrial jobs.

One day, a new student comes in to use a lathe. He initially goes to his instructor before the instructor brings him to me to check him in and record the equipment usage. He scowls and just generally seems irritated to me, but nothing strikes me as out of the ordinary until the end of the day, when he leaves without having me check him off the lathe, and without cleaning up the metal shavings and cutting oils from the machine. Okay, that’s kind of annoying but no big deal. I clean up the machine and close up the shop.

The next day, he is in again. Similar routine as yesterday. He goes to the instructor and seems annoyed when the instructor brings him to me.

Me: “Okay, I put you on lathe B. By the way, I cleaned up for you yesterday, but don’t forget that cleaning the tools and machine when you’re done is your responsibility.”

He grunts, which I take as an acknowledgment, and goes about the day normally. This time, he leaves earlier than yesterday, and once again, he does not clean up. Metal shavings are everywhere, the cutting tools have oils all over them and are strewn about randomly, some crumpled paper towels he used to wipe things are still on the table next to the machine, and a drill bit is still in a chuck in the tailstock. It isn’t anything particularly unusual for a machine in use, since machining can be very messy, but it is definitely not an acceptable condition. 

I realize I can use this chance to teach the guy a lesson. One benefit of the health crisis is that we have fewer students who will need to use a lathe this term than we have lathes. I leave the machine exactly as it is, allowing the oils to slowly gum up and get sticky as they tend to do when exposed to air. It isn’t too bad after only one day, but this continues. Every day he comes in, I put him on the same machine that has not been cleaned at all. He looks increasingly frustrated, and he usually cleans a little when he comes in, but he clearly is not getting the message as, day by day, the machine gets into worse and worse shape. 

I let the other instructors know what’s happening and my intent. We knew that besides my reminder, he was specifically told the same things in his orientation class, which taught shop protocol and such. He took a test on those protocols, which required a 100% score in order to be allowed to use any tools or machines. He has no excuse.

We all watch and allow this to happen for two weeks, with him coming in for around four hours a day, four days a week. Every day I put him on the same machine, and it becomes an absolutely horrific mess.

Along the way, we hear stories from other students, since the shop is very informal and everybody chats, about him calling me the “cleaning lady” and complaining about the machines always being a mess. He tells people I am bad at my job, and, my favorite, when another student reminded him that everybody was responsible for cleaning their machine and tools, he said, “Cleaning is woman’s work,” and that it was “that b****’s job” to clean up.

So, after two weeks, he still hasn’t cleaned up but has finished all of his classwork on the lathe. Nonetheless, when he is brought to me and tells me he needs to get on a mill, I ignore him and tell him that he is on lathe B. This pisses him off.

Idiot: “I said I need a mill! Are you deaf?!”

And he generally insults me more, but I will not tell him anything other than, “I have you on lathe B.”

Complaining to the instructors doesn’t help him, as they will not give him the overview and instructions for his mill projects, while they reiterate that he is on lathe B. By this point, everybody in the shop, students included, knows what is going on. Somehow, though, the idiot student still does not get the message. I am told that he has gone on to insult me, insult women in general, and complain to one of the instructors who is also director of the manufacturing program, who then apparently gave him an earful. 

I then get to relish the sweet, sweet reward of this idiot coming into the tool room, effectively my office in the workshop, with the director following him silently.

Idiot: “Uh, okay… Do you just want me to clean the machine so I can get on the mill?”

Director: “No, that’s not what I said. If this were a job, you would have been fired ages ago. I told you that she is the authority in the shop. I told you that you need to clean your station, she told you that you need to clean your station, and your peers told you that you need to clean your station, and you ignored all that. Then, you came to me to spout off a pile of bulls*** about men and women. Every single class in this program requires my approval before the system will even let a student register for a class, so if you don’t want to drop out or switch majors, this is what you are going to do. You are going to apologize for not cleaning up, for your stupidity and ignorance, and for your rudeness. You are going to beg her for forgiveness, and then you are going to do every single thing she asks you to do for the rest of the term, whether it has anything to do with what you were doing or not. If she asks you to sharpen a drill bit, you will sharpen the drill bit. If she asks you to carry some stock metal, you will do it. And every time you come to the shop, before you leave, you are going to make sure that not only your machine, but every machine is absolutely spotless. Understand?”

I don’t remember the exact response after that, but I did actually quite enjoy teaching him how to clean everything off using an industrial degreaser for the caked-on, congealed oils and then how to re-oil the machine afterward to get it back into working condition. He actually did as instructed and spent about six hours giving the machine the most thorough, detailed cleaning I have ever seen, and after a few more weeks of reflecting and sweeping up the entire shop every day, his attitude really took a turn for the better. By the end of the term, we actually got along pretty well, although I definitely give him a hard time pretty often. We don’t have any classes over the summer, but I am actually looking forward to him coming back in the fall term.

I worked for a while at a railway company. We had a big, busy office where customers could call in for help. Our network covered the Norfolk Broads, a National Park of rivers, waterways, marshes, and large, shallow lakes created by peat digging in the middle ages. Like all National Parks, the Broads is a popular summer tourist destination but has many fewer winter visitors. The result of this was that we had a summer timetable with more trains that stopped at more stations and a winter timetable with fewer trains and fewer stops. Unfortunately, that meant that sometimes visitors would be caught out when the timetables changed.

That was what happened one evening in September. An elderly couple had been out bird-watching in the reed marshes, and on returning to the station, their expected train had not arrived because the timetable had changed. They called our office and asked for help.

We called the head office since we had no one from senior management in. The problem was explained to the senior person at head office.

“Just tell them to walk along the tracks to the next station; there’s a train that calls there in just over an hour,” they said complacently.

Apparently, they didn’t think of the fast-fading light, the rising tide — yes, the river was tidal! — and the fact that, although no more trains would be calling at [Station] that evening, there would still be trains using the line!

We called a taxi for the couple and told them to send the bill to the rail company.

To put myself through college, I worked fraud protection for a retail store’s credit card. We would call out to people with suspicious charges or take calls from people we had blocked and basically try to confirm that the person on the other end was who they said they were and that their purchases were legitimate.

The job jumped between hectic times of non-stop calls and complaints, during peak hours, and extremely boring times later in the day leaving messages on answering machines. To try to alleviate the boredom a little, I made a game out of figuring out how to be as fast as possible, and I came up with lots of tricks to try to make myself a little faster.

At one point, our manager was dragged away on short notice to work on a new team, leaving us without a manager. We went a good five to seven months without a proper manager. The employee with the most experience on the floor acted as a quasi-manager when customers inevitably demanded to speak to one.

Eventually, we got a somewhat strict woman who had just retired from the military. Others complained about her no-nonsense approach, but I’ve had enough military friends to recognize it as pretty standard officer behavior and didn’t take offense. That being said, I did get an odd feeling that she didn’t like me whenever I talked to her, more than just her usual no-nonsense behavior, but too ambiguous for me to place exactly what it was or if I was imagining it or not.

A few months after she started working, I noticed this new manager standing a bit behind me. I glanced back, but she didn’t ask me for anything, so I went on with my business at first. When she didn’t move, eventually, I asked her if she needed anything, but she insisted she was fine and I should just go back to work. I tried to do so, though I couldn’t get past the odd feeling of being watched with my manager hovering behind me for so long, even if she claimed everything was okay.

A week later, one of my fellow employees was escorted out of the building. Management wouldn’t say exactly why she was escorted out, only that she wasn’t coming back. About the same time, the strange hostility I had been sensing from my manager disappeared; in fact, now she seemed to really like me, though I still didn’t know why.

That is, until our monthly team meeting came up. During that meeting, the new manager suggested that there were a number of steps she thought everyone should learn to help improve their speed at handling calls, and she suggested that I could potentially give tips to other employees. Eventually, she even had me do a brief twenty-minute visit with each of the slower team members to give suggestions for helping them to improve their rate at handling calls.

It was around then that I finally put together what had been happening. During the time we were unsupervised, two employees had noticeably higher metrics for their number of cases handled compared to everybody else: me and the woman who was escorted out of the building. I realized the manager likely suspected that both of us had taken advantage of the lack of managerial supervision to find a way to cheat the system to get our numbers high enough to earn rewards associated with high call volume.

In the case of the woman escorted out of the building, I’m quite sure she was “cheating.” She would publicly announce that she didn’t want to handle some of the more annoying — and thus slower to process — accounts and was going to skip them. In her defense, I don’t think she realized how much skipping them was artificially inflating her metrics or why that was such a bad thing. Surely she wouldn’t have been quite so blatant at admitting to everyone what she was doing if she had?

In my case, my high numbers were warranted. My tricks gave me a decent boost to the rate I could handle accounts in the later evenings. As an accidental side effect, my ability to make calls out so quickly resulted in my rarely getting the much slower to handle inbound calls during the evening, further inflating my metrics.  

I assume it was only after my new manager watched me working for a while that she saw what I was doing and generally decided that I had earned the numbers my metrics showed fairly. Thus, I got to stop being a suspect to her and instead became a manager’s pet that could help boost team productivity by sharing my “secrets” with the rest of the team.

I left only a few months after that to focus more on school work, and I got a much better paying job once I completed my degree, but after my many years’ — and managers’ — worth of work experience since then, I still occasionally find myself wishing that I could have that no-nonsense woman, who made sure that employees who met standards were rewarded and those that slacked off punished, as a manager again.

[Employee] works for me; that is to say, he sometimes does some work… if I can get him motivated enough. The problem is that he has a particular very specific qualification. While it’s simple to do, there are so few people that can train others, and it’s a very rare skill to employ.

[Employee] knows this and thinks himself invincible. He does what he wants when he wants, he’s rude, he’s often late, he makes mistakes, and he’s aggressive to staff. He makes my life difficult. The team resents him, and they resent me for not doing something about him.

Everyone is unhappy, but to get rid of [Employee] is to lose our biggest customer.

Me: “[Employee], can I see you for a minute?”

Employee: “What about?”

Me: “In the office, please.”

Employee: “Let’s see what this d**khead wants now.”

Me: “Sit down, please.”

Employee: “What now? You tell me off, I go back to work, and we do this again next week? Tell you what. I’ll skip to the end right now, shall I?”

Me: “I’m sorry, but we have to let you go.”

Employee: “You can’t let me go; you can’t do the [Customer] contract without me!”

Me: “I have that sorted. We have an agency.”

Employee: “Yeah! And they will charge you double!”

Me: “Yes, I know. After I spoke to [Senior Director] and explained, he gave me his blessing.”

Employee: “And that’s it, is it? I’ll collect my stuff, shall I?”

Me: “The team already collected it for you. Security will help you to the car.”

Letting anyone go isn’t easy, but this one time, he did try to make it so.

Many years ago, I worked in a trendy bar in the centre of Glasgow. The team was very cliquey and would often stop to chat between themselves and customers, even when we were really busy. It got to the point where I was the only person trusted to leave the bar area, do a job, and come back without wasting time. That’s how it fell to me to take all of the bins out, collect glasses, and replenish the stock.

One day, I was putting some rubbish bags in our holding area and noticed one of our metal buckets — used for serving multiple bottles of beer — balanced precariously on top of a number of bags. It started to tip toward me, but I caught it before it fell, which turned out to be extremely lucky because it was filled with vomit.

I took it inside and tipped the contents down the toilet before disposing of the bucket and starting to make enquiries about who was responsible for this. Eventually, someone directed me toward [Coworker] and we had this little chat.

Me: “Hey, [Coworker]. Did you have to clean up someone’s puke earlier?”

Coworker: “Oh, hey, yeah. It was disgusting, but y’know, I was the only guy on duty and it was in the gents, so needs must.”

Me: “Yeah, that makes sense, but why did you use one of our good beer buckets?”

Coworker: “[Manager] told me to do it.”

Me: “Ah, right. Did [Manager] tell you not to empty it and to stack it on top of a pile of bin bags?”

Coworker: “Erm, no. I just didn’t think.”

Me: “Okay, you’re a lucky guy, then.”

Coworker: “What do you mean?”

Me: “Well, when I took the bins out, the bucket nearly fell on me. Let me tell you, if it had, then you and I would be taking this outside right now. As I said, you’re a lucky man.”

[Coworker] stared at me until he realised I wasn’t joking and then pretty much ran off. I’m not a particularly violent or scary guy, but I think my anger was quite apparent. Whatever. It never happened again.