(I attended one of the Military Academies where I earned my bachelors. After exiting the military and taking a year off, I am ready to return to school. One of the schools I’m applying to asks for a copy of my degree. Here’s the thing about Military Academy degrees: they’re the size of a poster! Not something easily scanned. I call the Registrar’s Office at the Academy to ask if they have a smaller size or a digital version they can send me.)

Receptionist: “Hello. May I help you?”

(I get no identification or confirmation of what office this is; they just pick up and say hello.)

Me: “Ah, is this the Registrar’s Office?”

Receptionist: “It is. What do you need?”

Me: *explains* “So, do you have a digital version or smaller, easily-scanned copy?”

Receptionist: “I don’t do that.”

Me: “Okay… Do you know who does?”

Receptionist: “Yes.”

Me: “Okay… Could you please give me the number?”

Receptionist: “Sure. It’s [rattles off the number at high speed].”

Me: “Sorry, could you repeat that?”

Receptionist: *sighs* “Yes, it’s [still extremely fast]”

Me: “Okay, just to check, the number is [number]?”

Receptionist: *sounding very much annoyed* “Yes, that’s correct. What else do you need?”

Me: “Nothing. Goodbye!”

(I called the number, only to be informed the Academies do not make smaller copies for graduates. I ended up taking a picture and pasting it to an 8×11 paper via Word. Luckily, it worked.)

My brother’s birthday is coming up and he wants a certain big-ticket item concerning a certain boy wizard. It’s an exclusive product found only at a certain store.

I’m determined to get it for him, so I sign up for email alerts that will let me know when it’s in stock. When the alert comes in, I snag it to buy online and pick up in the store and mentally congratulate myself.

Suddenly, I get three emails in rapid succession: “Your item has been delayed,” followed by, “Your item is ready for pickup,” and then, two minutes later, “Your order has been canceled.”

I decide to swing by the store and see what’s going on. I find the pickup counter and tell the employee my tale. He responds with, “Oh, your order got canceled because you didn’t pick it up in time.”

Oh, no, you didn’t.

I ask for a manager and tell her the same tale. I also show her the time stamps on the emails that prove there was a two-minute difference between “Ready for pickup” and “Canceled,” and they know from the order that my name is not Barry Allen, thank you very much.

Her response is, “Well, sometimes we get a lot of items in the shipment and don’t feel like looking for all the pickup orders, so we cancel them sometimes. Sorry about that.”

Oh, no, you didn’t.

I probably could kick up a fuss, but I don’t want to make a scene. And clearly, if they don’t “feel like” doing their jobs, it’s not going to help.

Instead, I resolve myself to spending the weekend online and hoping some scalper has it on Amazon or eBay.

However, when I get home, there’s an email asking how my “buy-online-pick-up-in-store” experience was.

Oh, no, you didn’t.

I proceed to detail everything to that little comment box and send it off to cyberspace. I’m surprised my keyboard doesn’t catch fire. The next day, I receive a very apologetic email about my experience, offering a frantic dance of appeasement and free stuff.

They offer to ship the product to my house, free of charge, so it doesn’t have to get lost by the incompetent store employees.

Oh, and my brother loved it, too.

My mum told me a story last week about when she was an employee, later a manager, at a big-name fast food restaurant.

At the time, one menu item was a ham and cheese toasted sandwich, but on a burger bun. They would premake a certain number at the start of each day, put them in cold storage, and heat one up each time one was ordered.

Regularly, if registers were busy or something else arose, they would leave the line of half-made burgers lying out, go help out, and then complete the burgers later.

Also regularly, they would get complaints of dead flies in burgers, usually about this specific menu item, rarely anything else.

Turns out, the kitchen had a bug zapper above the prep bench, so when staff would go help out for ten minutes, bugs would get zapped, fall into the half-made burgers, and as the line was made fast, just slapping ham and cheese on multiple burgers in a row, workers wouldn’t notice one dead fly on one random burger on a row of ten or twenty.

I’m happy this chain now makes food to order, and I can actually see my burger being made. And that the restaurant Mum worked at is now closed.

(We had a system glitch overnight that meant that we took payments, but no orders were created, so we have to contact our customers to tell them and ask what they ordered, and manually create the orders for them. Most of them are very easy to sort, except for one. This customer has paid £201.)

Me: “So, if you could just tell us what you ordered, I will get your order on the system and we will get that sent out.”

Customer: “I have no idea what I ordered. Can you just pick some items for me and send those?”

(We carry over 5000 items; I really need some guidance on this.)

Me: “I can try. Could you tell me roughly what sort of thing you got?”

Customer: “I really don’t remember, sorry. Please just pick some things. I trust you.”

(I ran the customer through our basic categories and options. She eventually picked a category and item type. That narrowed down the selection to about 700 items, and again she told me to just pick some stuff for her. I told her I would make an order, email it to her, and wait for her to approve it before we put the item through. I ended up spending about forty minutes creating the order from our most popular items, as we had to make the order amount match as closely as possible to what was paid. She then eventually got back to us and told us that everything was wrong and that she wouldn’t have picked anything I have added, and she demanded a refund for wasting her time.)she

The doctor office where I work has lost two front desk receptionists at the same time without a two-week notice. While we are looking for someone to replace both of them, there’s only two of us left to take on the workload of four. That leaves me stressed out until we find the replacement, since my workload has increased substantially.

One day during lunch, I go to a nearby convenience store to pick up some almonds for snacking. I stand at the cash register for a good three minutes, clearing my throat and looking around for somebody to check me out, because I’ve had a god-awful day already, and I really want to have that snack for those days when I can’t even get a lunch. Finally, a sulky woman comes to the front register and immediately complains, “I’m tired of working the register. You people should just stay home.” In a foul mood myself already, I make the statement that I can leave the items there for her to put up later, or she can just check me out, which is part of her job. She takes off her apron and tosses it down, saying, “I don’t even need this job.”

A week later, my office manager is conducting interviews and I see the same woman sitting in the lobby. My suspicions are confirmed when my manager meets with her for one of the front desk positions. After she has left, my manager comments that she is unsure about the candidate and I relate what happened at the convenience store. I also tell my manager, “Maybe she had a bad day, but if she is willing to quit like that, she will leave you in the lurch.”

My manager hired her, anyway, and when she found out how many patients we dealt with in one hour — 30, to her five customers per hour — she quit.