A customer comes to complain about the key kiosk not making him a key. I follow the customer to the kiosk to check out the problem.
Customer: “See, it will not make my key!”
Me: “Did you put money in the machine?”
Customer: “Money?”
I then point out to the customer where he has to insert money so his key can be made.
Customer: “I didn’t know I had to pay for it.”
My daughter goes into a national sub shop chain to order subs for us. My order contains pickles. The young man making the subs looks at the condiments.
Employee #1: “We’re out of pickles.”
Employee #2: “We just got more; they are in the back.”
Employee #1: *Repeating* “We’re out of pickles.”
Employee #2: “We just got more; they are in the back.”
This happens two more times until [Employee #2] turns to my daughter.
Employee #2: “Would you mind waiting a minute while I get the pickles from the back?”
Daughter: “I don’t mind.”
Employee #1: “Oh, we have more in the back?”
[Employee #2] turns to him and points to [Employee #3].
Employee #2: “Remember, he just came back from the store where he got pickles?“
My daughter comes back to the car.
Daughter: “I am pretty sure that guy is stoned out of his mind.”
The sub was delicious.
This was in the early 2000s when chat rooms and Yahoo/AOL were the de facto standard of communicating on the Internet and it was a lot harder to verify things people would tell you about themselves.
I had a girl who looked to be in her late teens move in with me after I advertised an empty room in my house. One grating thing about her that I discovered right away was that she talked incessantly and often told far-fetched stories about herself. Many of her stories often appeared to garner sympathy — i.e. being sexually assaulted in a subway, having to give the resulting child up for adoption, etc. As tempting as it was to give her back her rent money and tell her to move along, I grinned and bore it only because I lived with my elderly grandma from ages seventeen to nineteen and drove that poor woman up the wall with my teenage antics.
Over the following two months, I noticed that my roommate received an unusual amount of mail and packages. The packages were always small gifts like teddy bears, chocolates, inexpensive jewelry, and such. I figured they were from her family and found it endearing. The house phone also frequently rang with calls for her.
One late evening, I was coming from work and was shocked to find a mass of police cars, EMT workers, and an ambulance congregating around my house with my front door smashed in.
After letting someone know that I was a resident of the house and wanted to know what in the world was going on, I was let in. There was my roommate sitting on my couch with officers screaming at her: “You need to stop lying! You have the entire police force here looking for a dead woman, etc., etc., etc.! This is the third time I’ve had to deal with you this past year alone, and this town has been putting up with your s*** since you were ten!”
As it turned out, when the story unfolded, the girl had been talking on romance chat rooms and dating sites posing as a dying cancer patient, using fake photos of a seriously ill and emaciated cancer victim, and getting lonely and gullible guys to shower her with gifts and money.
One of the guys fell so much in love with her that he insisted on coming to visit her even though he lived several states away. Figuring that the jig would have been up with this particular mark, she then pretended to have a medical emergency on the phone with him and, according to him, began gasping and wheezing and became unresponsive.
What she didn’t count on was him dialing 911 in his state, giving the dispatch my address, and that dispatch quickly connecting to the dispatch in my area to alert them. After the police broke my door in, since no one was answering, they found the idiot hiding in a closet.
The girl turned out to be only seventeen years old; she’d left home and gotten a fast food job, and her parents simply never reported her missing.
I ended up giving her a three-day notice.
It’s rather difficult to get hired for this particular job. I personally was interviewed twice and had to do some detailed IT-based tests to gauge my actual knowledge and skills. I then had to spend a month in rigorous training before being allowed to officially join the team.
Our team recently hired a new agent to help assist with customers experiencing technical difficulties with their service. Within the FIRST WEEK of joining us, my coworker with whom I was very good friends showed me an email this guy sent to her.
New Agent: “Dude, they sent me one of your tickets to work on, and I don’t know what the h*** they were thinking when they hired you.”
He proceeded to point out something he thought said coworker did incorrectly but was actually correct.
New Agent: “I then did a query for tickets you did… Dude, on ticket #123 you put down that the guy lives in Kansas City, Missouri. WAKE UP! Kansas City, Missouri?! How about Kansas City, Kansas? Are you walking around in a dream world? Then, on ticket #321…”
He pointed out another “mistake” that was actually correct.
New Agent: “Your tickets are a joke and I have no idea how you even have a job here. Maybe if you would focus more on WORK than your hair and makeup and boyfriend at home, you would understand how the system works. Do not EVER touch any of my tickets — EVER!”
Apparently, this guy didn’t query enough about this particular coworker, or he would have discovered that she also just so happened to be one of the floor managers who had been promoted to the position two weeks earlier. Not that it would have mattered, anyway, if she wasn’t.
Unsurprisingly, the next day, his locker was cleaned out and his name was whited out from the employee roster.
Back in my college days, I worked in a hotel chain’s kitchen as a dishwasher to pay my rent and bills. Most people would think that Joe Schmoe in the back of the kitchen running dirty dishes through the mechanical washer was probably the absolute last on everyone’s list of priorities. However, within the first week that I started working there, I noticed a casually dressed person — not wearing any kind of uniform or name tag — who would come through checking different food items and writing on a clipboard.
He would always give me a friendly smile and ask if everything was okay. I assumed he was some manager from a different department, especially since he would occasionally ask me something like, “Hey, when you find time, could you sweep out (wherever)? That would be awesome! Thanks, buddy!”
I spotted a cook picking dropped food off the floor and putting it back on the plate to be served. I protested to her about it — only to be told, “Mind your own business!” — and then reported the incident to the kitchen manager. I was later approached by the casually dressed manager.
Manager: “Thanks for bringing that hygiene issue to our attention. Just to let you know, if you encounter any problem — any concerns, no matter how petty they are — you can come to my office at [floor]. What goes on here in this hotel is everyone’s business, including yours.”
Me: “Oh, are you the general manager?”
He chuckled.
Manager: “I’m here to make sure things are running smoothly.”
He stayed true to that; any concerns I had — like the mountains of unsold food that I was throwing away every day! — I could go discuss with him, and I would immediately see changes happen. I would always be greeted with, “How’s it going, buddy?” and he would make small talk, ask questions about me, the whole bit.
After a while, I asked the kitchen manager what exactly his position was. This man was not just the general manager; he was the OWNER of not only that hotel, but four other hotels in the region!
That was fifteen years ago, and out of all the people in management I remember, he’ll always stand out as the true example of what being a leader and manager is all about.
