One of my first jobs is at a liquor store. I’m behind the counter and a young man comes up with a couple of bottles of booze. I ask for his ID and he shows it to me.

Me: “I’m sorry, but this ID is fake. I can’t let you have these.”

I put the bottles he was trying to buy behind the counter.

Customer: “What do you mean, you can’t let me have them? That’s my ID. It isn’t fake.”

Me: “It clearly is. Sorry, no booze for you.”

Customer: “How dare you—”

Me: “Shut up and get out of here before I call the cops.”

The young man scowls and storms off.

After my shift, I’m talking to my boss as I get ready to leave.

Me: “Yeah, the ID was just about perfect — best fake I’ve ever seen — and I would have believed it was real… except that I know you can’t be born on November 31st.”

One weekday night, we aren’t taking tickets, as there are only two ushers for our fourteen-screen theater, and we are cleaning theaters. We get a call on the radio that two kids have purchased tickets, walked in, and presumably saw that we weren’t taking tickets, walked out, asked for a refund, walked back in, and are likely still trying to see the movie.

My friend and I walk out of the theater we just finished cleaning and see these two kids walking to their theater. We slowly follow them, as to avoid suspicion, and as soon as they walk into the theater, we both sprint down the hall.

As they sit down in their theater, we both walk up and say:

Us: “Can we see your tickets?”

They both just got up and walked out. They tried to buy tickets again, but the box officer didn’t let them.

I was a trucker for a while, and that comes with plenty of stories of crazy things in so many places. One of my favorite stories, however, comes from a piece of malicious compliance that came together just perfectly.

I tend to be a bit on the lazy side when I can get away with it, and I searched for quite some time to find a company that would keep me far away from unloading the trailers myself. I found a good one that had a 95% drop and hook rate. (Drop off a trailer full of goods and then grab a new one that’s either loaded or to take to the next pickup.) 4.9% of them are either handled by the receiving dock or by lumpers — dockworkers hired by warehouse companies specifically to unload trucks.) That last .1% is a list of places that just want to watch you work or be convinced that you really shouldn’t operate their lifts.

In my contract, I saw that there was a place where your hourly rate for unloading was stated. That was not for the hours that you were sitting and waiting to be unloaded but for when you were the one unloading your own trailer. I also saw that the contract allowed for alterations to be made to the price of this service to be charged to the customer. As a joke, I put in not one but two extra zeroes. $1,500 an hour for unloading a trailer should deter most people. Most people saw that, got a good laugh, and then pulled in someone to unload for me.

Most people, like I said, were smart. This run was set to arrive at 03:00 to a certain clothing store in the mall. I’d been to this store a few times before and it was always the same manager, [Manager #1] receiving me, and it was always the same runaround. If I wanted to get unloaded, I had to wait for someone to get there, then I’d have to sit and wait while the poor kid back there got the load off, and then I’d have to wait for traffic to ease up to get out since it was always almost 10:30 by the time I finally left, leaving me with only a couple of hours left on my clock to get to a truck stop for the day.

I got there and, yep, [Manager #1] had come in to accept the load. It was always hard to be smart at 03:00, and I can only imagine that was part of [Manager #1]’s usual runaround. This time was a bit different for a few reasons. One, he smelled like there was a bit of an herbal calming remedy about him to settle his nerves for the night. Two, he said that he was completely understaffed and there was no one around to unload me, so I’d have to do it myself. Three, I couldn’t stay until my usual time because he had to leave before 05:00.

To be fair to him, I did try and say:

Me: “Sure, but my contract says—”

Manager #1: “I don’t give a d*** what your contract states! I don’t have anyone in until the store opens, and I’ve got an appointment that’s more important than some trucker’s contract! Just unload it yourself!”

I considered it for a moment and then went back up to my truck to get my tablet. (This was in 2019, before the global health crisis, and the company had just swapped over to tablets for certain things, like signing off on expenses or getting permissions.) [Manager #1] was fuming when I came back and handed him the tablet.

Me: “Just read through and sign with your finger.”

He didn’t read through. I had twenty pallets at one-and-a-half thousand pounds each. The only available tool to unload was a manual pallet jack. I started my work clock and began unloading at 03:15. At 05:00, [Manager] looked on in satisfaction to see me about three-quarters of the way through as he was out the door. At 05:15, [Manager #1]’s replacement, [Manager #2] of the day shift, came running in with his face as white as a sheet to see me taking off the fourth to last pallet.

Manager #2: “Please tell me that I’m reading this wrong.”

Me: “I wish I could.”

I lied, knowing that [Manager #1] was about to be up a muddy creek with a spoon.

Me: “I even tried telling [Manager #1] what he was getting into, but he just skimmed and signed.”

Manager #2: *Slumping* “Wait here. I need to call my district manager.”

Me: “Better be quick. I want to be out of this lot by 06:30 to beat the morning rush and get a good breakfast.”

He ran back and I continued unloading. When I finally got the last pallet off at 05:50, I turned off my time clock as the district manager came in, followed both by [Manager #2] who was looking somewhat relieved, and by [Manager #1] who was somewhere between terrified and furious.

[District Manager] spoke to me, holding a printout and looking at it for my name.

District Manager: “You’re Mr. [My Name]?”

Me: “That’s me. I take it they sent over the contract [Manager #1] signed?”

District Manager: “Yes, and that’s just it. [Manager #1] is accusing you of forging his signature on this since there’s no way he’d sign off on a multi-thousand-dollar contract just to unload a trailer — especially since he claims you insisted on unloading it yourself.”

I whistled.

Me: “That’s a heck of an accusation. Hey, is that CCTV I see up in that corner over there?”

I asked, knowing full well that the entire loading dock was covered by a slew of cameras. The one I pointed out was positioned just right to catch the whole conversation at the door.

District Manager: “[Manager #2], get the footage. We don’t have audio, but we do have visual on them.”

[Manager #1] lost his fury and now just looked petrified.

One review later, [District Manager] turned to me.

District Manager: “You can go, [My Name]. [Manager], go wait in the office. Now.”

I got going while the going was good and grinned like a loon on the way back to my truck. I called my manager, booked some home time, and walked away with enough money to last until the end of the month.

The next time I went into that store there was a new, much more sensible manager who always had a man on staff to unload the trucks.

Yes, I admit I milked it a bit. As I said, I was regularly there from 03:00 to 10:30 at the latest. Throw on top of that the fact that I’ve never been the healthiest of individuals and it took me that long to keep from hurting myself. This was during the summer in southern California, and even at night, it was still around 90F (32C) outside and hotter in the trailer without any air conditioning. A fat man with no AC is going to take all the time he wants.

I am the hiring manager for our big box retail store. We’ve gotten a lot of interesting characters, and during this time of crisis, I haven’t been overly picky.

Then, one day, I got this resume. Well… “resume” is only used in the loosest definition of the word. It was an email with “[Candidate]’s resume” in the subject and then just a link in the body.

Okay… Odd, but not something that kills your chances. Some of the more verbose applicants at least say something about the resume being available on this or that job hunting site and provide a link to that. While I consider this a tiny bit lazy, I HAVE found a few diamonds this way.

I clicked on the link. Until my dying day, I will laugh every time I remember it. I actually did burst out laughing uncontrollably. I laughed so hard and so long that some of my employees and a few fellow managers came to investigate.

The link had brought us to THE most pretentious website about the candidate. The website was crammed to the gills with bullet points about his “achievements.”

One said, “I went to [War-Torn And Extremely Dangerous Country] and single-handedly transformed the local government to serve the people.”

Another claimed he had “arm-wrestled a [Notorious Biker Gang] leader and won.”

There were obviously-staged photographs of him shaking hands with various people of color and smiling. The captions under these explained how they claimed that the handshake had transformed their lives.

His one and only reference was supposedly some kind of general of a nation who would worship the ground the applicant walked upon; all we had to do was call and mention his name!

Every sentence was self-serving, self-congratulatory, and painfully obviously a complete and utter lie. I half-expected him to tout himself as the one who threw an evil ring into a volcano or personally splashed water on a green witch’s face and melted her.

But the pièce de résistance? A video of him strategically slouched in an ornate almost-a-throne chair, surrounded by fawning girls while talking about how awesome he was.

It was so bad that it became an infamous story about the worst — but funniest — resume ever submitted.

It turned out, though, that we had an intern who had been a classmate of this candidate’s. When the story reached the intern, they came to talk to me.

Intern: “Yeah. He made up a lot of unbelievable stories in class. One time, he claimed to have gotten in a street fight where he did some Jet Li fighting after getting stabbed in the stomach with a bowie knife. Funny thing is, he doesn’t have any scars to prove it, and he refuses to explain why or admit that he’s full of it.”

Obviously, I never called the applicant back for an interview because the job had nothing to do with writing fantasy stories.

I worked for a rental car company at an airport for a few years. I was out in the parking lot and someone waved me down.

Customer: “My car isn’t starting! I want a different car, now!”

I took one look at the keys and the car he was in.

Me: “Sir, you are in the wrong car. Yours is over there.”

The dude was in a Ford Mustang when he had rented a VW Jetta. Honestly, the dude probably thought he could scam us for the Mustang.