In the early 1990s, I worked for a bank, and every year they’d have a donation thing among the employees to raise money for a charitable cause. (I’ve long since forgotten what organization it was for, but I do remember that it was one that’s well known for paying their executives a lot while actually using very little for the cause.)

Human Resources would always say, “You don’t have to give.” But there was an unspoken, “…but you’d better.”

This was proven when one of my workers (getting minimum wage) simply could not give. HR harassed him to the breaking point, and he gave them every penny he had left: thirty-six cents.

And then, the HR lady came to me, all ticked off over his donation.

Me: “What more do you want? He gave every cent he had until payday at the end of the month.”

She left and reported him to our department officer.

I used to work in the arrears department of an energy company. Most of the time, my job involved taking calls from customers, but on occasion, field agents would call us to give updates or ask questions.

Field agents weren’t bailiffs; they were just staff we sent to try and speak to the customer in person, and if not, hand-deliver a letter. Sometimes debts weren’t paid because the customer had died or a new tenant had moved in, or sometimes they would find the property had been demolished and we hadn’t been informed. Field agents could also offer help, including going through income and expenditure forms to work out a payment plan.

One day, I got a call from one of our field agents. He had been a field agent for over twenty years. Before that, he had been a bailiff for the local county council. There wasn’t much that could rattle a man with that much experience. But that day, I could tell something was up. He sounded… upset.

He gave me a customer account number and asked me to put the customer on our reduced tariff: a price plan with extremely low unit and service charge prices specifically for vulnerable customers, such as the disabled or those on specific benefits.

As I went through the account, he explained what had happened.

[Field Agent] had visited the customer, where he discovered that she was living in abject poverty with an infant. They lived in one room of the house because it was all she could afford to heat, and even then, the room was bitterly cold. She looked gaunt and pale. Her cupboards were bare, and she only had one tin of baby formula. The baby didn’t have a crib and instead slept in a cardboard box on the floor. She had no furniture, only a mattress on the floor.

It turned out that while she was in the hospital giving birth, her husband had run off with his coworker who he had gotten pregnant. He had taken all the things they had bought for their baby to give to his mistress, including the crib, all the baby clothes, and all the toys.

To add insult to injury, he had also cleared out their bank accounts and left her with nothing. He never came to see the baby and never paid any child support. He didn’t even bring any food or gifts for his child.

This poor woman had been trying her best — even paying us a few pounds every week without fail. She didn’t have any family who could help her, either. Even her in-laws seemed uninterested and ignored her. It was just her and her baby.

[Field Agent] went through various forms with her as per his job, and then he shut himself in his van to cry.

He had seen it all; he had been attacked by customers (often with a weapon), had dogs set on him, and had even found a corpse at a few properties. But this… this broke him.

He gave the poor woman his lunch, which he said she ate like a starved animal. Then, he sat down with her for several hours and let her use his personal phone (she didn’t have one) to call various charities. He managed to put her in touch with an organisation that would help make sure she was on all the right benefits and would help her get legal aid to get child support from her scumbag husband.

I removed all the fees on the account and backdated the lower tariff as far back as I could.

At the end of his shift, [Field Agent] went back to the woman’s house and brought nappies (diapers), baby formula, and several bags of essential groceries, as well as a cheap mobile phone he had picked up so she could take calls from the various people helping her.

When he got home, he asked his family and friends if they had any baby clothes they were no longer using. He ended up with two black sacks full of baby clothes, as well as some toys, and his neighbour donated a buggy, all of which he delivered to the woman a few days later.

She later wrote us a letter expressing her gratitude and thanking [Field Agent] for all his help.

[Field Agent] would occasionally check in on the woman if he could. I would always ask him for an update when he stopped by the office to drop off paperwork. Last I heard, the woman had been moved to a council house which was much nicer than her musty, rundown home, and she had a court date for finally getting the child support payments she was owed.

Years later, I still wonder about that woman and her son and hope they’re doing well.

My husband found out the other day from his sister that several of his siblings had presented their parents with a memorial plaque for their anniversary. My husband was never asked to contribute, which is unusual for this group; typically everyone is asked to pass the hat.

He asked [Sister-In-Law] how much the plaque cost and said that he wanted to contribute to it after the fact. This is when [Sister-In-Law] started getting cagey, dodging the question, and finally telling my husband to “pay it forward.”

Husband: “‘Pay it forward’ is for drive-thrus. How much did the plaque cost?”

Again, she refused to say. She finally told him:

Sister-In-Law: “Just pay me $25 to $30.”

Husband: “No, I’ll determine what my share is after knowing the final amount.”

Again, she refused to answer, insisting that he should pay her $25 to $30 to “pay it forward”.

I contacted another in-law of mine, who is married to my husband’s brother, and told her the situation. She asked her husband and found out that [Sister-In-Law] had nothing to do with the plaque and hadn’t spent any money on it at all. Another sibling had bought the plaque without any outside contribution.

So, basically, [Sister-In-Law] had seized the opportunity to try to grift off my husband.

[Sister-In-Law] is an anti-vaxxer, so in response, my husband made a donation in her name to a pro-vaccine charity and sent her a text to let her know exactly how he’d “paid it forward”. She’s now also signed up for multiple vaccine charity mailing lists.

An adult male customer and his mother are shopping. They make a purchase, and as soon as the receipt is printed, the customer starts scrutinizing it.

Customer: “You overcharged me!”

Me: “We did? Can you please point to where on the receipt it reflects that?”

Customer: “Right here! I was supposed to get 10% off of [item]!”

Me: “You did. They came to $10.31, so $1.03 was removed.”

Customer: “No! You’re wrong! You need to round up to $2!”

Me: “That’s… that’s not how it works.”

Customer: “In math, you always round!”

Me: “If we were rounding mathematically, we’d be rounding down, not up.”

Customer: “You overcharged me! Fix it!”

At this point, the mother finally speaks up.

Customer’s Mother: “Don’t worry about him and his math. The closest he’s come to using a calculator was when he used it to spell ‘BOOBIES’.”

She then marched him outside, calling him an idiot. I’m glad someone said it!

Related:
Math Is Your Friend, Part 15
Math Is Your Friend, Part 14
Math Is Your Friend, Part 13
Math Is Your Friend, Part 12
Math Is Your Friend, Part 11

Unfortunately, things can often get screwy with small rural churches. The thing is, everything is basically being worked on by volunteers, and those volunteers are not necessarily professionals. There can also be very little oversight or built-in accountability and generally iffy organization. So, you get the occasional person who in other locations might be the petty HOA board tyrant and tries to throw their (nonexistent) weight around, people who feel proprietary because they’ve been with the church so long, etc. And because it’s a social community instead of a business, people get leery of calling people out because it’ll cause drama (or at least pop the top on all the preexisting simmering drama).

I went to a tiny private high school that was affiliated with a nearby church. Some guy died, and in his will, he left some money in the trust of the church to be used for the school.

A decent amount of the congregation decided that the money should go to the church instead, and apparently, the church meetings got spicy.

I didn’t go to the church, but I got to school and even my unperceptive self could recognize the palpable aura of people being pissed off. (School staff had been at this meeting, and a decent amount of other students did attend this church. I mostly got details from a friend and my dad since he was part of the school board.)

Then, to make it worse, the church treasurer’s mother for some reason had access to the church safe. She took out the inherited money, which was for some reason physically in said safe, and had herself a shopping spree.

That didn’t de-escalate things, but it did get a lot of the details hidden from us students since there was now a question of pressing charges, so I’m actually not sure how it ended.