My laptop breaks down less than a week before I’m going to be moving abroad for months. I’m desperate to get it repaired before I leave. My father drives me to the repair place on the day they said it would be ready. He has a bad temper when things don’t go his way, so I talk to him beforehand.

Me: “These people are doing a rush job for me, so I need to be extra polite. Please, just let me do all the talking.”

Dad: “Sure.”

Me: *To the clerk* “I’m here to pick up my laptop.”

Clerk: “I’m afraid we haven’t gotten to it yet.”

Me: *Extra sugary* “I told the other guy that I’m leaving the country in a couple of days, and he said he’d try to have it ready by today.”

Clerk: “We didn’t have a chance yet.”

Dad: “So, in other words, it was a lie!”

I ended up leaving the country without my laptop.

I was hired by a company that is the world’s largest at what they do. I’m a long-term temporary employee (AKA a contractor). I work at their site as a direct employee. There are quite a lot of contractors on the project I work on.

We all need computer-based training, but I’m one of the first to try to take the training. My supervisor sends me a link to the internal home page with directions to click the “Training” link on that page.

I’m denied access to the home page. I send the error page I get instead back to my supervisor, and she opens an IT ticket to have me and the other contractors granted access. After a few days, we’re told it was done. I bring up the home page, click on the training link, and am again told I am denied access, so I go through the “send error to supervisor/she opens IT ticket/wait for IT to fix it” rigamarole again. But this time, she makes sure she’s clear with IT that I need access to the computer-based training system to take the mandated training.

We get the word back from IT that it’s fixed, so I get access to the main training page… but the next page I need access to tells me I am denied access. This goes on for a total of six individual pages on the route to my individual training page, with each page needing the “supervisor/IT ticket/wait for IT” loop, despite my supervisor telling IT each time that I need access to the training system and not just the current page I got the access denied message for.

I finally have access to my individual training page, with the twenty-three — yep, twenty-three — classes I need to take, twenty to sixty minutes each. But every single one of those links gives me an “access denied” message. My supervisor tells IT I need access to all twenty-three of my training classes.

A few days later — they’re all fixed, and it’s been weeks since I started trying to take my training. The first dozen or so training modules go just fine. But then, there’s a string of nine or so that state that, in addition to going through the training module, training will not be considered complete until I’ve read a document at the given link. What happens when I click the link?

You guessed it, access denied. I give my supervisor the list of all the links to the documents I need, she sends it to IT, and after a few days, they fix it.

It takes me over five weeks to get my eighteen or so hours of training completed, and at least four of those weeks are waiting for IT.

The only saving grace is that IT has at least been fixing each issue for all contractors, not just me, so all the contractors who try to take their training after me are able to do so on their first try.

Apparently, IT was only willing to risk taking malicious compliance so far.

A child was running loose inside our shop, throwing around brochures and dummy display phones, with his mother standing nearby and watching him.

Me: “Would you please tell your child to stop his behavior? If he damages any property, you will have to pay for it.”

Mother: “But I can’t say that to him! Can’t you tell him in my stead, please?”

I just looked at her in disbelief until she got uncomfortable enough to do it herself.

I was visiting my daughter in her hometown. We’d gone for a walk and were starting to get hungry. We were approaching a strip mall with several restaurants, including a well-known franchise place. My daughter is a vegan, so she did a quick search on her phone for the restaurant’s menu to see if they had anything she could eat.

Daughter: “Ooh, they’ve got some good-sounding stuff.”

Me: “Cool, let’s eat here, then.”

We went in, ordered some drinks, and made our dinner choices after perusing the menu some more. We also considered ordering appetizers, but we weren’t sure if my daughter could eat them, so we decided to ask the server.

Server: “What can I get you?”

Me: “Are the onion rings vegan?”

Server: “Uhhh, I guess. They don’t have meat.”

Me: “But does the batter have dairy or eggs in it?”

Server: “I dunno.”

I considered asking her to go check with someone else, but we weren’t that bothered about getting an appetizer, so I let it go.

Daughter: “I’d like the [vegan pizza], please.”

Server: “We don’t have that anymore.”

Daughter: “Oh. Then I’ll have the [vegan pasta dish], please.”

Server: “We don’t have that, either.”

Daughter: “How about the [vegan burger]?”

Server: “Nope.” *Snickers* “We got rid of all that vegan stuff. You’re better off without it, anyway. It was awful. No one liked it.”

The vegan ingredients used in those dishes were brand-name items that I’d used in my own cooking many times. They’re definitely not “awful”.

Daughter: “Do you have any vegan entrees?”

Server: “Uh, you can have a salad, I guess.”

Daughter: “I’m going to need a minute.”

Server: “‘Kay.” *Leaves*

Me: “Forget this. Let’s just pay for our drinks and go.”

Daughter: “Sounds good.”

So, when the server came back…

Me: “We’d just like the check, please.”

Server: “Oh. Sorry about that.”

Daughter: “It’s okay. Maybe you guys should update your menu, though?”

Server: “That’s not up to me.”

Me: “No, we realize that.”

I was thinking, “Your not-great attitude IS up to you, though.”

We got a great meal elsewhere, but I was still annoyed about the experience at [Chain Restaurant], so I emailed them. The reply I got back was something like this:

Representative: “We’re very sorry to hear about the experience you had at our restaurant. We would have been able to make almost any dish vegan for your daughter, and the server should have known that and told you so. If you come back, we’ll be happy to tell you all about our vegan options. Also, here’s a $50 off coupon for your next visit.”

I passed the email and coupon off to my daughter (since the restaurant is in her hometown, not mine). I’ll be curious to find out what her next visit is like.

Related:
Letting You Down Vegan And Again

We owned a small but popular fine-dining restaurant. Our phone number had the same first four digits as the local branch of a big bank. Apparently, their transfer system was to dial a three-digit extension number from an in-house phone only. But employees wanting the loan department would dial the first four shared digits and the three-digit extension number, which, of course, was our phone number.

Me: “Thank you for calling [Restaurant]. How may I help you?”

Bank Employee #1: “Loan department, please.”

Me: “This is [Restaurant]. You need to check your phone procedures.”

After two or three calls a day, I figured out what was happening and calmly relayed what they were doing wrong, but the calls kept coming. I called customer assistance at the bank and crawled up the chain of command trying to find a solution.

The employee I spoke to clearly didn’t care about my problem.

Bank Employee #2: “You’ll have to change your phone number, I guess.”

Me: “No. This is your problem to fix. The next time I get a call, I will politely ask your employee to hold, and it might be a few minutes until someone is available. I have four lines, so you may have lots of people wasting their time and your money on hold because you’re too lazy to send out a memo.”

The calls miraculously stopped.