Back in 2019, my husband and I purchase tickets to see a well-known comedian at a local theatre in April 2020. For obvious reasons, the show gets postponed. The venue confidently picks a new date of April 2021. Everything will be fine by then, obviously! No shock that we receive an email a few weeks before the show to say that, too, will be rescheduled.

A few months go by, and the health crisis situation “improves” in the UK to the point where most similar events are now going ahead. I’ve heard nothing about when this show has been rescheduled to, so I email the venue asking what’s happening. I don’t hear back, but I’m not too worried. To be honest, we’d only be selling the tickets anyway, as my husband is CEV (clinically extremely vulnerable to [contagious illness]), and it wouldn’t be safe for us to sit in a packed theatre.

And then, one evening in March 2022, I get an email from the venue with information about current [health crisis] protocols to be aware of for the show… which is happening the next evening! What the f***?! I double-check my emails and, sure enough, this is the first I’ve heard from them since the show was postponed in the spring of 2021. I immediately email them to point this out and request a refund.

Over the course of the next month, I go back and forth with the venue. They claim they emailed about the new date but, when challenged, they cannot prove it. They deny receiving my email asking for the new date, but I show them evidence of having sent it to two of their email accounts. They say they can only offer a refund if requested a week before the event. I point out that this would be hard for me to do when they didn’t tell me the new date until twenty-four hours before the show!

Eventually, they offer me free tickets for any of their shows. I point out that this is no use to me as theatres aren’t safe for my family. They continue to refuse a refund, insisting it’s impossible.

Finally, I ask if they have a governing body I can escalate this to or if I should just go direct to Trading Standards.

Weirdly enough, I get an email offering me a refund not twenty-four hours later!

I’m the author of this story. Basically, my job around twenty years ago was assessing small travel insurance claims.

Like the “star” of my previous story, many claimants failed to do the very basic thing of reading the insurance policy they were buying. This led to lots of misunderstandings about what was and wasn’t covered. Sometimes I felt sorry for people who ended up not covered for genuine medical emergencies while on vacation, but there were also many who made assumptions and, frankly, took the piss.

One such case that sticks in my mind was a lady whose flight was delayed, as I recall for around twelve hours. Knowing that she was insured for flight delay (but not actually reading what this meant), she decided to hit the airport shops and buy herself a whole new supply of makeup to “replace” what was in her checked-in bags. She sent in receipts for high-end, complete collections — several hundred pounds sterling worth of cosmetics — somehow believing that the insurance company would agree that her not having any lip gloss for twelve hours was an emergency and would cover this expenditure.

If she’d read her policy she’d have known she was covered for something like £10 an hour after the first six hours, so about £60 or around a fifth of what she had spent in her opportunistic shopping spree!

Related:
Talking Down Before Falling Down

I work for the [global health crisis] helpline at a hospital, guiding staff on how to get a test, isolation requirements, etc. In 2020, it was extremely busy, but now, in 2022, it’s waning out, to the point that there are three of us and there is often an hour between calls.

After twiddling my thumbs for about thirty minutes, a call comes through. I do my usual greeting.

Caller: “I’ve been on hold for FIFTEEN MINUTES!”

Our telephone system said there were twenty seconds between connecting them to us and me answering. I don’t get why people lie like that.

I’m shopping when I see a woman with a small boy in tow. The child breaks away from the mother and, right in front of her, starts pulling jars of mayonnaise off the shelf and dropping them on the ground. She watches him shatter maybe twenty bottles before ambling toward him and slowly pulling him away. As she heads down the aisle, I see her clicking her fingers at one of the employees.

Woman: “Heeeeeey, somebody smashed a whole bunch of bottles over there. Somebody should clean it up. My kid could have been cut by all the glass!”

Me: *Passing* “If you check the cameras, you’ll see that it was her kid who broke them while she watched.”

Woman: “F****** snitch!“

And she threw a bottle at my head — in front of witnesses and on camera. I needed some stitches and she got jail time for assault.

I’ve just been hired at a UK university. Someone in Human Resources misspelled my surname when adding me to the system, which meant it was also wrong on my contract and on my IT username.

I do have a Spanish surname that’s not common even in Spain; I’ve never met anyone outside my family with this surname. Still, it’s only seven letters; it would have taken the HR person two seconds to double-check.

My contract is redone; my IT login isn’t. Instead, they keep my username as a misspelled version of my surname, but they create an alias so my email address is the correct version.

My boss and I pop into the department’s manager to ask her to speak to IT again. She says she’s been told that usernames can’t be changed, so they figured it’d be easier to just create an alias for the email and keep everything else as is, rather than go through the trouble of creating a new username for me. After all, I’d be the only one to ever use or even see my username.

Me: “So you’re saying that every single time I log into the system, I’ll have to misspell my name?”

The department’s manager looked at me as if she’d only just realized the implications of IT not spending an extra five minutes on my case.

My boss insisted that my username was redone, the department’s manager spoke to IT again, and everything was resolved within a day or two. But that last conversation shouldn’t have been necessary, and it coloured how I perceived my new colleagues.