I’m testing to become an EA (enrolled agent), which is somewhat similar to a CPA (certified public accountant). To become an EA, you must pass three tests, in any order. These government-mandated tests are proctored and administered by a private company.

I arrive at my testing facility on the day of the test, as scheduled. Getting ready for the test is a very intensive process; I basically have to store everything in a locker so I can’t cheat.

They scan me with a metal detection wand to make sure I’m not caring in a computer, and they check my sleeves, shoes, pants, and mask to make sure I’m not smuggling in a written answer sheet.

They sit me down at my assigned computer, and I click to verify that my name is correct. The testing program then makes me verify that I agree to follow the testing rules. I click yes… and the computer freezes.

I raise my hand for help, and the proctor arrives. They click on the “Next” button a couple of times. Suddenly, the test thinks I’m on my halfway break, skipping past the entire first half of the test.

Proctor: “There you go, unfrozen.”

Me: “Ummm, that’s not correct.”

Proctor: “What do you mean, it’s not correct? You wanted to go to your break, right?”

Me: “No, I wanted to start the first section.”

We both stared at the screen in mounting horror. I’m not sure which of us said it, possibly both of us simultaneously, but I distinctly heard the word “s***”.

The proctor left to get help. When help came, they gently led me out of the testing room.

After some struggle with resetting the test, they decided to reschedule my test free of charge.

It’s a quiet Saturday. Most of my coworkers don’t come in on Saturdays, but I do so that I can take a day off during the week. There are only a few cars in our massive parking lot.

I’m working at my desk, going over investment information, when I hear strange noises coming from outside. I head to our beautiful lobby to investigate. Some woman has pulled up into the parking lots closest to our lobby’s giant windows. She’s pulled up right next to another car.

She’s opening and slamming the various doors of her car and ejecting trash from her car — mostly Cheetos and Cheeto bags, but also several clothing hangers and some face masks. Her driver’s side doors heavily impact the car next to it several times.

At no point does she actually physically leave the car. She’s crawling around inside it, throwing open doors, throwing stuff out, and closing the doors.

Then, I notice that there’s a police car in our lot, too, at the end of one of the rows, just sitting there.

The woman sees me through the lobby windows and makes eye contact. Then, she abruptly shifts her car into reverse — rear driver side door still open — and pulls backward out of the spot, but it doesn’t stop there. She keeps pulling backward, maneuvering through narrow gaps in cars behind her, and still making eye contact with me.

There is, by the way, no need to shoot the gaps like this. The parking is very sparse, and she could have easily not threaded her car into single-car-width gaps, and in fact, had she pulled straight back, she would not have needed to do any threading. However, she seems to be aiming her car to deliberately go through these narrow gaps.

Finally, five rows away from the lobby and in line with the driveway, she abruptly throws her car into a bootlegger turn, complete with squealing tires, and shoots off down the driveway. The force of the turn closes the rear door that had been hanging open.

The cop car starts moving again at this point, driving in another direction.

The worst part — that car she kept hitting with the doors? It was mine.

I’ve been working for the company I’m at now for seven years and I’ve had issues with one lady. Well, everyone has had or is having issues with the same lady. We’ll call her “Princess”. Luckily for me, she works in the other building so I don’t have to personally interact with her. She’s very good at deflecting and always lays down a very thick blanket of BS about how busy she is and how hard she works and how difficult her job is. The problem is that no one, not even ownership, has been able to make a list of things she actually does, and yet they still keep her around.

When I first started, my understanding was that [Princess] was supposed to be Human Resources and handle invoicing. She was supposed to have everything ready for me when I started and be able to answer any questions I had. After being here for about three months, I would tend to email her asking a question every couple of weeks about things such as PTO (paid time off), vacation, holidays, and so on. After that three-month point, she asked why I hadn’t been reading about this stuff in the employee handbook. I told her I didn’t know the company had one, so she finally got me a copy. As you can see, she’s not really good at her job, whatever it is.

Fast forward four years. The company gets an actual HR lady (who is just as worthless as [Princess], but that’s another story). She doesn’t like the payroll system we use and wants to change it, and [Princess] agrees. Before the end of the year, the worthless HR lady gets let go and the company starts working on finding a different HR person. However, that doesn’t stop [Princess] from finding a new payroll company to go through, so she says she’ll handle it all.

The new payroll system is set up at the start of the New Year and there are bugs to be handled. [Princess] says she knows about the issues and is working with the payroll company to hammer them out.

Several months into the new year, another new HR lady is hired (she’s so lazy, she lasts about six months and gets let go) and the new payroll system has been activated. However, people are not getting their PTO added to their paychecks. Others have been having ongoing issues with their hours not being reflected correctly and getting shorted. Others have been having ongoing issues with a complete day or two being missed on their paycheck. There have been constant issues with the new payroll system, or at least, we thought it was the payroll system. Every complaint has to be brought up to [Princess], and she’ll “fix” the issue the following week by adding on missed pay or adding on PTO that was missed.

I know of these missed paid hours/PTO issues, and I inform my supervisor of an upcoming day I need off in a few weeks. She approves it verbally, and I log into the website to request the day off. My supervisor accepts it and it is approved in the system. A couple of weeks go by, and my day off is coming up at the end of the week. I check in the system and it shows that I have no PTO, which is incorrect. I should have two weeks of PTO. I email [Princess] and copy my supervisor about the issue of the system not showing PTO being available even though I have two weeks. [Princess] emails back saying she’s aware of the issue and not to worry about it.

My day off comes and goes. The next week goes on, and my paycheck comes in and it’s a full eight hours short. My wife and I are kind of paycheck-to-paycheck right now, and I have the mortgage due and now I’m short. I’m pissed.

I email [Princess] and copy my manager.

Me: “Why is my paycheck short eight hours? I see that my PTO wasn’t applied. You knew about the PTO issue, and now I’m short money and I have bills to pay.”

Princess: “It’s an issue with the payroll system. Even though we know you had PTO, it wasn’t automatically applied. I can add your missed PTO to your check next week.”

Yes, she says, “we,” as if it was the company’s and/or payroll’s fault.

Me: “Why didn’t you manually add in my PTO to payroll before it was submitted, since you knew it was an issue? And the week prior, I emailed you about PTO not showing up for me in the system. I know you can manually add PTO or adjust hours as needed, so why wasn’t it done? Because now I’m short money for bills.”

Princess: “I wasn’t going to hold up payroll for an entire company for one person because of a bug in the system. You’re not the only one not showing PTO in the system when it should be, and it’s a known issue I’m working on.”

Me: “The issue has been a ‘known issue’ for almost four months. Weekly, I’m having people from the floor complain to me about missed hours and PTO not getting applied to checks. I have to constantly tell them I have no control over payroll and they need to talk to you or at the very least speak to [HR Lady]. This issue with payroll since you switched us over has been a problem for a lot of people — a lot of people in a similar or worse financial situation that depend on payroll to be correct. It hasn’t impacted me until now and I’m pissed.”

Princess: “I’m extremely busy and I haven’t had time to get to everything. No one has told me about other payroll issues; this is the first I’ve heard about it. I can’t get to your PTO to manually add it to the payroll before it’s submitted because of how busy I am and how much work I have to do.”

I snap in my next email response to her.

Me: “I don’t want to hear about how f****** busy you are, and I’m tired of you deflecting issues. I don’t want to hear about your ‘woe-is-me’ bulls***. You were made aware of my PTO, and you just admitted to not wanting to do it because you’re busy. I know you’ve been aware of payroll issues because everyone is telling me they’ve been having you add on missed hours/PTO to their next-week checks for them, so you need to stop lying.”

Princess: “You have no right to talk to me like that! I’m very busy and I won’t continue this conversation any further.”

Me: “I will talk to you how I see fit because you’ve failed to do your job, and the payroll issues continue to be a company-wide problem since the change over almost four months ago. If you don’t want to get spoken to like a child or treated like crap by everyone, then you need to stop with the lies and do your job. If you want, you’re more than welcome to forward this email chain — and my original email from three weeks ago about PTO hours not showing up in the system for me — to ownership so they can be involved in the whole payroll issue we’ve had since you wanted to change the payroll system.”

I never heard back from her on the issue.

The very next day, all missing or incorrect PTO in the payroll system was fixed. I had my missing PTO pay written out in a check and on my desk. Also, an issue with HSA funds taking two to three weeks to be transferred to the HSA accounts for all employees was also fixed.

How [Princess] still has a job and still works for this company is beyond me. Thankfully, my interactions with her are almost nonexistent since I had to yell at her, so at least I have that going for me.

I recently bought my first house. I contacted an Internet company to provide me with Internet. They had to bring new cables to my house from the service box. Because of the way our neighborhood is set up, my service box is in my neighbor’s backyard. They used bright orange cables and promised that the cables would be buried in a week.

Two months later, they are still not buried. Then, the neighbor runs over them with his lawnmower.

I call into support. After going through an automated menu, I’m put on hold. It’s about 15:00. At around 17:00, I start making dinner.

About fifteen minutes into dinner prep, I hear the hold music stop.

Employee: “Hello? Are you there?”

I run for my cellphone to answer before they hang up… with a knife still in my hand.

Me: “Hello, I’m aieeeeeeeeeee!”

I scream as I scald myself on the steam coming off of a pot, dropping the knife onto my foot and thus stabbing myself, too.

Employee: “Hello, are you there? If I don’t hear a response soon, I’ll hang up.”

I check the phone; it is on mute.

Employee: “I’m hanging up now.”

Me: “No, no, no, no, no, I’m here! I’m here!”

Employee: “Please come to the phone more rapidly in the future. How can I help?”

I take a moment to grab paper towels for my foot with my scalded hand.

Me: *Hissing quietly* “Ow, f***, f***, ow…”

Employee: “I do not appreciate being spoken to like that. I’m going to hang up if you keep swearing at me.”

Me: “I’m not swearing at you. I dropped a f****** knife on my f****** foot and I’m in f****** pain. It has nothing to do with you. Please don’t hang up on me. I’ve been on hold for two hours and fifteen minu—”

Click. 

Me: “F***.”

I took a moment to clean up and wrap my foot in bandages. Then, I used my phone to go to the company website and ask to discontinue my service. I got a retention call back twenty minutes later.

Client retention services sent someone out to reconnect the line and bury it this time.

During my high school sophomore year, I worked at a large chain pharmacy store through a couple of the major holidays and the dreaded 13¢ coupon days.

I hated the 13¢ coupon days. The store is right next door to an assisted living building for folks over fifty-five that are still well enough to live on their own but sometimes need help. These folks lived for the 13¢ coupon days. They came in droves and snatched up as much as they could for every 13¢ coupon that was in the weekly flyer.

The 13¢ coupons were usually for smaller, knickknack-type things, something you normally wouldn’t want to spend money on, but these people gobbled up the items. We had pencils, large erasers, travel items — such as hand lotion — that kind of thing. Within the first day, we would easily be out of a lot of these items, and the old people would just rant and scream at us for not having more and then demand rain checks to be made.

The manager would have to explain to them that the coupons do not get rain checks and that all items on the coupons are first-come, first-serve. So many angry, blue-haired old ladies. It sucked.