A manager came around our office looking for anyone who knew a guy he was about to interview. No one seemed to know, but the name was very familiar. It bugged me like crazy; I was sure I knew him. But from where?! I spent the evening thinking it over, and I checked his social media. We clearly hadn’t worked together or lived near each other. His face looked so familiar, too.

A few days later, I see the guy come in for his interview, and then it hits me. I know now where I know him from.

I manage to catch the manager later that day.

Me: “Hey, I wanted to talk to you about the guy you interviewed.”

Manager: “He seemed like a really good fit. You think you know him? It would help him settle if there is a familiar face.”

Me: “I just realised today that I interviewed him for a position at another company. Offered him a job.”

Manager: “And?

Me: “We checked his references afterward and none of them were real. Like, some of the companies didn’t even exist.”

Manager: “What did he say?”

Me: “He lied about it and told me that they must have all closed down since he left. But I checked, and they never existed in the first place. The guy lasted a week, and then he stole several office items and didn’t return his IT equipment.”

Manager: “Ah, okay. Well, I’d best check that out.”

Sure enough, he had done the same thing. All his references were fake, and the offer was withdrawn. It takes some guts to lie so blatantly like that!

Our hotel has added a sushi restaurant to the lobby. Tonight is a hotel-wide manager’s outing; all departments are being supervised by supervisors only and the one for the sushi restaurant is relatively new in the department. She and the two waitresses, as well as the sushi chef, were all off last night.

Three girls come in, sit in the sushi bar area, ask for a manager, and then explain.

Customers: “We were in last night and got sick from a bad sushi roll.”

Supervisor: “Are you guests of the hotel? If so, I can credit your room.”

Customers: “We’re not.”

Supervisor: “How did you pay?”

Customers: “Cash. We want another dinner as compensation.”

They then ordered the exact same roll they had supposedly gotten sick from the night before. It was such an obvious scam, as no one who has ever gotten sick from something would eat the same thing any time soon, let alone from the same place the very next night. Unfortunately, they picked the perfect night as there wasn’t an actual manager anywhere on-site, and no one that was there that night had been there the previous night to refute them.

They ended up with $65 worth of free food, which they ate without a problem sitting there the whole time. Of course, they didn’t tip, either.

When you call your doctor’s office, a lot of times you are sitting in a queue waiting for someone to answer the phones because the clinics only have a certain number of people on the staff (fewer now due to the health crisis). The hospital network I work for recently opened a few local call centers to handle the overflow of phone calls to help reduce wait times. This is what I do. My job mainly consists of registering new patients, making appointments, refilling medications, and sending messages between the patient and their doctor. Each doctor has their own set of strict guidelines I must follow, and it varies from doctor to doctor.

It was the end of the week, in the middle of the month, and it was kind of a slow day. I could see the queues and not one time throughout the day was there anyone in there. Calls were being answered as soon as they came in. About twenty minutes before the lines were shut off for the day, I got a call. The woman was already angry when I answered.

Patient: “I’ve been calling all day! You people are so lazy, not answering the phone when that’s your job! I want an appointment with my doctor!”

Me: “What is the reason for your appointment?”

This is a required question. She listed off a bunch of symptoms that hit a red flag for [health crisis]. After checking with her doctor’s guidelines, I informed her that her doctor would not see her in the office until she got a negative test for [sickness].

Patient: “I already took a test! It was positive.”

Me: “Your doctor cannot see you in person with a positive test, but he’s willing to do a virtual visit.”

She then proceeded to curse and scream at me about how incompetent her doctor was and threatened to just get a new doctor. I tried explaining to her that all the doctors I work with do not see [sickness] patients in the office right now for the safety of the clinic staff as well as other patients. After going back and forth with her for a few minutes — much cursing from her side — I finally got her to agree to a virtual visit.

Unfortunately, her doctor didn’t have any appointments available for three days because of the weekend. This started another round of screaming at me. I suggested if she really wanted to see someone that she should go to an urgent care. She started changing up her symptoms to make them seem more urgent. Suddenly, she’d had a fever yesterday of 105F (40.5C) and her throat was so swollen she couldn’t eat anything and her cough was so bad that she couldn’t breathe.

At this point, I’d been on the phone with her for nearly fifteen minutes and had yet to hear her cough.

Patient: “I tried to go to an urgent care, but they don’t take people with mild symptoms.”

This was a lie. They ONLY take people with mild symptoms, and the symptoms she JUST described to me weren’t mild. If anything, she should have gone to the ER, but I am not allowed to even suggest that.

After a few more minutes of her cursing at me, I told her that I was sending a message back to the nursing staff to see if there was anything they could do for her. I only have access to the schedule that the doctors want me to see. They may have sections blocked off for other things and can fit patients in, but I cannot make those appointments. Also, they could schedule her with one of the nursing staff or another doctor, which I could not do per her doctor’s guidelines. She called me useless.

I sent the message to the back.

Me: “You’ll hear from someone within forty-eight hours.”

This was the standard phone script for all messages; plus, this was literally the end of the day. I disconnected the call before I got cursed at more.

Technically, I can disconnect a call at any point if a patient is screaming and cursing at me, but I didn’t want to inflict her on one of my coworkers when she inevitably called back. I wanted to try and keep her on the line long enough that she couldn’t call back because business hours would be over.

In the message I typed to the nurse, I could not state how the patient acted toward me because patients can see those messages. What I can do is talk to my supervisor, who will listen to the call (as they are recorded) and then call her doctor’s office manager, who is given access to listen to the call. They can put notes on your chart that only your care team can see. Doctors don’t take well to you screaming/cursing/threatening their staff.

The woman got her appointment with a nurse who was free over the weekend, but she was dismissed from her doctor’s care.

A lady approaches my register with a kids’ snowsuit.

Lady: “I bought this in season, and I want to return it. I don’t have the receipt.”

The snowsuit was now super cheap on clearance.

Me: “I can’t process the return without a receipt, ma’am.”

She finally produced the receipt which, shocker, showed that she had purchased it on clearance. I still denied her the return, and the manager denied it, too.

I worked in a pharmacy for about five years. I recently started working at a doctor’s office, where now my job is handling the refill requests FROM pharmacies and forwarding everything where it needs to go with relevant information needed. Today alone, I got three separate messages in my queue from the front office, saying that a patient was out of medication and needed us to send in refills and that they had contacted the pharmacy about it already and were told they didn’t have refills.

All three patients lied and wasted EVERYONE’S freaking time. All of them had been sent refills to their respective pharmacies literally within the past three to six months, with refills for one year. But, of course, I wanted to double-check since our prescription refill program has been messing up lately, and it was entirely possible they never got our fax.

Every SINGLE conversation went like this.

Me: “Hi. I’m calling from [Doctor]’s office. Can you check to see if you have [medication] for [Patient] on file? They called us saying they talked to someone at the pharmacy and were told they didn’t have any refills left.”

Pharmacy: “I don’t know why they would say that, because they do have refills remaining; they never called us to refill.”

Or:

Pharmacy: “it’s been ready for them to pick up for a few days.”

I think I was just extra salty today, but I was pissed off at these patients. Like… it’s one thing to think that you might not have refills remaining because your bottle says zero refills and you weren’t aware there’s another prescription on file, but to tell our front office, “I talked to the pharmacist/pharmacy technician and they told me I had no refills left,” when, in fact, you didn’t actually speak to ANYONE over there. You’re wasting our time and the pharmacy’s time by lying.

I was pissed off enough (and had very low blood sugar when this was all happening) that I called all three patients personally and said:

Me: “Hi, I just got off the phone with your pharmacy, and they told me you already have refills remaining and that they can refill it if you contact them.”

Or:

Me: “It’s been ready for you to pick up since Sunday; they would have told you that if you had called them.”

All of them tried to weasel their way out of me calling them out, but I wasn’t having it. I told two of them, “Next time, please actually SPEAK to someone and confirm that you have no refills remaining before you call us saying you haven’t taken your meds in four days because you’re ‘out of refills.'”