I worked in the cell phone department of a big retailer. This was right at the time that carriers switched away from two-year contracts to monthly payments for the phones themselves. I can’t even count the number of people that struggled with the concept, but there was one guy in particular that stands out.

Customer: “I’ve never had to pay more than $100 for my phone!”

Me: “Yes, $100 up front and $40 a month for your phone line. But if you upgrade now, the phone is discounted to $20 a month, and the phone line is discounted to $15 a month, for twenty-four months. So you will actually pay even less for your phone.”

Customer: “There is no way I’m going to pay $480 for a phone! I’ve never paid more than $100!”

I was bartending at a basement bar venue that was a decent-sized place. We had two bartenders and a barback on this particular Sunday. The other bartender was my favorite type of guy to work with: jaded and surly with a sense of humor.

The barback, however, had been setting off red flags since he’d started a few months before. He just kind of seemed like a sketchy druggie. I started hearing that he was asking for advances on his check to buy coke and getting yakked up in the broom closet. I trusted the people telling me these things, but I always verify for myself, so I started paying closer attention to him.

I noticed that [Barback] would sweep behind the bar toward the end of the night, which I would never do when I was a barback. You wash dishes and stock as directed by the bartenders; you generally don’t belong behind the bar unless you are bartending. But I wasn’t trying to be a jerk to the guy for sweeping.

Tips had been feeling light for a little while, but I never had a smoking gun until the night in question. I was counting up our tips to split between [Bartender], [Barback], and myself when I realized I only had four $20s. The problem is that when I adjusted all my credit card tips, I pulled out five $20s, and that wasn’t counting [Bartender]’s $20s.

I announced that something was off. [Barback] started to sweat. The owner went to check the camera and, sure enough, saw [Barback] go in for his signature sweep behind the bar right after we pulled our credit card tips. As soon as our backs were turned, this slimy motherf***er dipped his hand into the tip bucket and took $100 out.

[Owner] told him to give it back now or deal with the cops. He had it stashed away in a shadowy corner like the rat he was.

He got fired immediately. [Bartender], [Owner], and I spent the next couple of hours drinking and cursing [Barback]’s name. Every time the conversation would change topic, someone would bring it back with, “I can’t believe that motherf***er!”

As a bonus, a couple of weeks later, I was taking inventory in the beer walk-in — kegs and over a hundred different bottles and cans — and in a half-empty six-pack, I found a phone matching one that had gone missing from a server’s purse. [Barback] had been working the night the server’s phone went missing, and the stashing behavior matched up, too.

There’s no worse Karma in the restaurant industry than stealing from your coworkers.

I work for a bank a major high-street bank in the UK, specifically in the fraud department. In 2018, a customer called in because we wouldn’t let him access his account. Normally, we only restrict accounts if there are security concerns or if we think they’re a fraudster. I pulled up his account and notes, and I could tell something was off, mainly because of the twenty pages of notes, each with ten notes a page.

The more I read, the more gobsmacked I became. For the last three years, this customer had been under the impression that he was in a relationship with Rita Ora. That’s right — the actual singer-songwriter Rita Ora. At every opportunity, this customer had sent money to numerous destinations at the request of his “girlfriend”, and no matter what he had been told by staff or police, he still did not believe that he was a victim of a scam and was being robbed. (We had to get the police involved because we could only assume a person so duped had to be a danger to themselves.)

He told us that he had met her family and been to their houses. Unfortunately, he had never met Rita personally because she had such a busy timetable.

As I’m sure anyone would, I felt pity that someone was so deep in an illusion and being taken advantage of. Surely, you’d think, this person was vulnerable, perhaps a low-income gent late in life, and this was the only joy to which he clung.

No, this man was twenty-six. I have no idea what his job was, but it pulled in a cool £8,000 (around 9,900 USD) a month after tax. Granted, most of that was sent to “Rita”. He started trying to hide his dealings when people tried to stop him, but as far as we could confirm, in total, he had sent her over £250,000 (over 300,000 USD) over these years.

I later found out that we had no choice but to close his account down; even after the highest head of my department physically went to this person with all our evidence of him being robbed, he still wouldn’t see the light.

I’m one of three Disrupted Operations Supervisors (DOS) for my airline, which means when something goes wrong with a flight at my airport, I’m the final authority. For some stupid reason, headquarters (HQ) decided that at my airport, there has to be a supervisor on duty twenty-four hours a day, even when it’s closed. (I tried to find the logic in this but I gave up.)

I was picked for the night shift — 20:00 to 6:00 — despite my functions, due to scheduling isues.

One day, an executive at HQ summons us DOS to an emergency meeting there on the day of a major holiday, requiring two of us to fly there from our respective bases.

I’m supposed to end my shift and go on vacation that day, so I try to convince HQ to let me video conference in order to save them money and time on my part — both via phone and email with cost estimates. I’m told no way: be there or be fired.

Since the earliest flight leaves one hour after I clock off, I don’t have to actually clock off. I catch the flight — ninety minutes — arrive there, and wait for three hours to have a thirty-minute meeting with a young executive, who tells us he’s our new boss and that we have to run everything by him now. After that, I go to the airport, wait another two hours, catch my flight back home, clock off, and go on vacation.

The cost of this little power trip to the company, you ask?

Total number of my hours: nine hours and thirty minutes paid at twice the usual rate due to the holiday, multiplied by three due to vacation interruption, and multiplied by one and a half for out-of-base work. It came to 2565€.

Travel expenses, including meals: 450€.

So, just because a moron had to have a little moment of dominance over three women, I got an extra 3015€.

I am having dinner with a friend at a popular full-service restaurant. It’s about 7:00 pm on a weekend, so the place is bustling with activity. All the tables are occupied, and there is a waiting line to get in.

Amidst the racket of the large main dining room we are seated in, I hear someone deliberately and loudly clear their throat. I turn my head just in time to see a restaurant manager about to address a diner at a table that is exactly in the middle of the room. The manager speaks in a carrying voice that cuts through all the ambient noise.

Manager: *In a very professional tone* “Here is your cashback. Please note in the future that the ‘tip’ line on your bill is to tip your servers, not to get money back. We are a restaurant, not a bank.”

Of course, nothing extraordinary happened after that. The room became quieter for a moment, but that was it. I still have a bit of contemptible awe for the diner’s audacity, though.