I work at a chain sandwich shop. Our jerk manager fires a coworker for putting too many olives on sandwiches. How many slices did he put? Like twenty on a foot-long sandwich. How many is the correct number? Five for a foot-long and three for a half-size sandwich.

This leaves just [Manager] and me in the store. He then goes on break for twenty-five minutes while I get slammed with a bunch of customers.

Me: “Can I get some help, please?”

Manager: “No. On break.”

I go on break later that day, and [Manager] gets slammed.

Manager: “[My Name], come back to work.”

Me: “No, on break.”

At the end of my shift, [Manager] informed me that I was being written up. I walked out. I got a call a week later from the owner begging me to come back. Seven of the ten employees had been fired or made to quit by that moron.

I work for a poultry plant as a QA (Quality Assurance) supervisor. My team’s job is to check that all the machines are operating correctly, the temperature of the poultry is good, the product is cut properly, and much, much more.

One section in particular does leg quarters, and a major problem we have in that area is that after the product is sealed in a vacuum-sealed bag, the bag will get punctured, and the box begins to leak on the pallet.

One day, I’m in the next section over when I notice a couple of pallets set to the side with “hold” tags on them — our way of marking product that needs to be fixed. I wander over and ask my coworker, a 5’2″ tall girl, how it’s going.

She explains to me that the production line keeps trying to get things past her without fixing them or ignoring her completely. She is obviously upset and getting overwhelmed. This girl weighs maybe 110 pounds if she’s soaking wet, so I’m already fairly protective of her, as is her husband, who also works in QA.

She is saying she is going to quit, and I can tell she is near tears at this point. I tell her we need to go tell [Supervisor] so he can come and fix the situation.

After [Supervisor] comes down and gets on to them, we continue our checks and get back to business.

Five minutes later, I go back to check on [Coworker], only to find her now truly in tears. I calm her down as best I can, just enough to get the story from her.

One of the pallet stackers decided it was too much to ask for them to change out leaking boxes, as they have to remove already stacked boxes to get to any leaking ones we find. Apparently, one also said something rude to [Coworker], which is what finally drove her to tears.

We are usually nice and just pull the problem boxes out enough so they can see the issue and fix it without us placing a “hold” tag on it. The stackers have decided to just push them back into place, and the pallet jack drivers have decided to continue to try to hide said problem boxes.

Now, [Coworker] is in tears and very upset.

Me: “[Coworker], go take some time to calm down. I’ll work this area, while [Coworker #2] will continue to handle my and his original area alone.”

[Coworker] leaves, and I inform [Coworker #2] of the situation. He agrees and informs our other coworkers of what happened.

We stop being nice and begin to tag every problem we find — not just me, but every QA who walks by. After half an hour, five pallets are set to the side with issues, mostly leaking boxes.

As lunch comes around, I find the supervisor of the area.

Me: “You need to tell your stackers that if we pull a box out, it gets fixed. No questions, no arguments; just fix it.”

Supervisor: “We have too much going on to be fixing that stuff most of the time. It will have to go out like it is.”

Me: “Nope. QA is above you; you don’t get to decide. We do you a favor by only pulling them out to get fixed. If we tag it, it’s on the record. If it’s only pulled out, there’s no record of anything happening.”

Supervisor: “We just have too much to do. We can’t fix it all, so it just has to go out that way.”

Me: “Then we will be tagging every problem we find. We do a lot for your area, but if you’re insisting you won’t be fixing it, we will stop being nice.”

For the rest of the night, every problem we found was immediately tagged and told to be set aside. QAs are the only ones allowed to place — or remove — any hold tags, so their area was way behind for the rest of the shift.

Mess with one QA, get them all, especially when you make a young girl cry.

Last year, I spent several hours on the phone with customer support for a major online retailer after their shipping service lost a package with most of the Christmas gifts I had bought for my family, the total value of which was somewhere between $500$ and $600.

I’m pretty sure the driver looked in the package and decided to keep it. I’ve gotten packages delivered by [Company] logistics that look like they’ve been opened or messed with before.

The customer service representative was insistent that they couldn’t ship replacements out. He just kept telling me there was nothing he could do, but he would offer to upgrade me to their subscription service. It was really hard not to laugh at that since I already had [Service].

He even fought me when I gave up on that and tried to get a refund so I could just reorder everything.

After hours of fighting this guy over the phone and being put on hold for over half an hour at a time multiple times, the representative randomly transferred me to someone else without saying anything about it.

The new customer service representative picked up and had no idea what was going on, so I explained the situation to her. She told me to hold on and put me on hold again.

Five minutes later…

Representative #2: “You should have your replacement items in a few days.”

When I was nineteen, I joined the Navy as a recruit. During the first two weeks, we had to do all sorts of exercises before we could be shipped off to our respective service locations.  Among these were physical trials, the last of which was the dreaded 3,000-metre timed run. Being more of a sprinter than a long-distance runner, I hated that one. We had done similar tests in school when I was growing up, and I hated it then, too.

The run actually went pretty well for me, though. I pushed myself hard and felt the taste of blood in my mouth and my whole body aching, but I knew I was doing well. I was hot on the heels of one of my squad mates, who happened to be an elite volleyball player in tremendous shape, so even though he pulled away from me on the finishing stretch, I felt confident that I would score a good time for my run — perhaps even a personal best.

As I crossed the finish line, my body rioted and I ended up in a ditch, vomiting from the sheer exhaustion. I had pushed myself beyond the limit. Still, though. Good time. Should be worth it.

Later that day, back in the barracks, one of the training officers came to find me.

Lieutenant: “[My Name]?”

Me: “Yessir.”

Lieutenant: “I’m afraid I have some bad news. We don’t have a time for your 3,000-m run.”

Me: “What? But I…”

Lieutenant: “It seems the guys responsible for writing down the times missed you. And a few other guys. Since this is a required test, you’ll have to run it again.”

I was gutted. I felt sure I had scored a good time, possibly the fastest I had ever run that distance, and they failed to record it? Man, that smarts. (I’m actually still a bit sore about that, twenty years later, because now I’ll never know how fast I actually managed to run it).

That same evening, I went back out there to do the run again. I was tired, so I wasn’t able to put in the same level of effort this time, but as long as I ran it under a certain time, it would at least be approved. I did the best I could, crossed the finish line exhausted once again, and returned to the barracks for a well-earned night’s sleep.

The following morning, over breakfast, I was once again approached by our lieutenant, who was looking sheepish.

Lieutenant: “[My Name], I’m sorry about this…”

Me: “What is it?”

Lieutenant: “Your second run yesterday?”

Me: “Yes, I did it.”

Lieutenant: “That’s just it. We still don’t have a time recorded.”

Me: “You’re kidding me!”

Lieutenant: “Afraid not.”

Me: “So I have to do it again?! That’s three runs in two days!”

Lieutenant: “I know, I know… Look, I don’t know what to tell you. We’re not going to hold the results against you if you get a weak time; just get through it in less than the fifteen minutes required.”

At this point, I was fuming. How difficult could it be to look at a stopwatch as a runner comes across a finish line? Even if the times were slightly inaccurate due to the manual recording, it can’t be that hard to get SOME kind of result written down? Thinking the guys responsible for this must be absolutely useless at their jobs, I headed back to the barracks to get back into my sneakers and tracksuit.

Once again, I ran that dreaded 3,000-metre track around the base. Once again, I hated it. Once again, I crossed the finish line, feeling like I was going to vomit. This time, though, I had learned my lesson.

Over by the finish line was a guy with a clipboard and a stopwatch. I went over to the guy to make sure he got my time down. It couldn’t be that hard; there were only two runners on the track.

Guy: “What…?”

Me: “Just checking to see that you wrote my time down this time. I’m [My Name].”

Guy: “Oh…”

Me: “Yeah.”

Guy: “…”

He just stood there with a blank look.

Me: “So?”

Guy: “Uh… what…?”

Me: “Write it down!”

Guy: “What?”

Me: “My time! Write it down, there, on that piece of paper!”

Guy: “Uh… oh, yeah…”

Me: “You’re still not writing! That number, on your stopwatch, write it down on that line there.”

It still took him some thirty seconds to finish the simple task of writing down six numbers on his piece of paper. Honestly, I half suspected the guy was either on drugs or just completely useless. I literally had to point to the correct line on his sheet, and I refused to move until I could see that he had actually written down my time next to my name.

In the armed forces, we are sometimes given access to some really dangerous things. Like guns. Good thing this guy was only assigned to handle a stopwatch.

As my father got into his eighties, he needed more and more help with things, and one day, he called me with an odd one. His bank wouldn’t let him into his safe deposit box. He had opened this box decades previously at a smaller bank for free. Sometime later, they sent him a letter saying that they had been bought out and that his box was now at a larger bank. He didn’t think much about it. But after several more years, when we went to the new bank to get into his box, he said they wouldn’t let him in.

So, I went into the bank and found a customer service person.

Me: “Hi. I have my father’s power of attorney, and he said that he’s having trouble getting into his safe deposit box.”

The representative took my father’s information and typed for a while.

Representative: “Hmm. Your father doesn’t have a safe deposit box with us. I’m sorry. He’s mistaken. Sometimes older people forget where their boxes are. It happens all the time.”

I went back to my dad.

Me: “Dad, I’m sorry, but you’ve got the wrong bank. They don’t have your box. They looked it up. Maybe you closed it? Maybe it’s at another bank?”

Dad: “No! Here’s the key! Here’s the letter I received. They have my box.”

I went back to the bank.

Me: “My dad is sure he has a box here. Here’s the key, and here’s a letter showing the box is at your bank.”

The representative typed for a while again, getting conspicuously annoyed.

Representative: “I don’t know what to tell you, but your father is mistaken. We do not have his box. If we did, it would show on the computer. Here’s all your father’s account information. There is no box.”

Me: “Can we try the key, please?”

Representative: “No. I can’t let you go into someone else’s box just because you have a key to it. Your father is mistaken. We don’t have his box. Please go.”

And there it sat.

Then, one day, I was at another of my father’s banks. (He believed in keeping a little money in multiple places in case of a bank failure.) I was griping to the woman there, and she wrote down a name and number on a piece of paper and said, “Call this woman.” And I did. She turned out to be the operations manager for that first bank branch.

Me: “Hi. My father thinks he has a safety deposit box at your bank, but the customer service reps say no. Is there any way you can help us?”

I heard a bunch of typing.

Operations Manager: “Your father does not have a box with us. What’s the number on the key?”

Me: “[Number].”

There was more typing.

Operations Manager: “Hmm. That’s a mystery box. We have no name attached to it, it’s not assigned to anyone, and we’re not allowed to assign it to anyone in the system. How about you come in and we try the key?”

Walking into the bank, meeting the operations manager, and going into the boxes, under the eyes of the original customer service representative… Not gonna lie. I enjoyed that. The key worked, my dad’s stuff was all there, and we grabbed it fast. The operations manager told us later that they had had computer problems migrating everything from the original bank, so that’s why it wasn’t in the computer.

Lesson: computers don’t eliminate mistakes; they just allow people to be more confident in their errors. And sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the right person to help you.