I work at a small company delivering potable water to people who don’t have access to either city water or a private well. We deliver to the same customers pretty much every week. Some customers are great and go out of their way to make deliveries easier or at least make sure that they don’t make them any more difficult than they have to be. A few customers just don’t give a crap and expect us to make deliveries no matter what they do to make things inconvenient.

One customer made several changes to their property over the last couple of years that made making deliveries significantly more difficult. I spoke to my boss about them, and he laid out the conditions that would need to be met before he would consider dropping a paying customer.

The customer was literally just barely within the limits. And to their credit, they did keep up with their bills.

I dreaded seeing their name on the delivery list every other week. Then, they changed to wanting deliveries every week because their children were moving into the house, as well. After that, payments started being more sporadic. The checks we got changed from the name of the homeowner to their daughter. My boss only takes cash or checks, not credit cards, as he feels no compulsion to give any money to credit card companies or to increase prices and pass the cost on to the customer.

One day while I was in the office doing some end-of-day tasks, the phone rang. The caller ID said it was this problem customer. [Boss] answered, and I eavesdropped. It was the daughter; she wanted to start paying by credit card. [Boss] said no. Then, she decided to drop her “threat” to change companies.

There was such hope in my heart as I saw [Boss]’s face turn red. He hates bullies and being bullied. [Boss] immediately agreed that that would be best and hung up on her. He walked over to the delivery schedule calendar and crossed their name off of the list.

Two days later, I got called into the office to hear a message left by the daughter. She was begging us to make deliveries again while she apologized for everything. She had discovered that we were by far the cheapest option for them.

One of the things that made them frustrating to deliver to was not just the physical difficulty of the delivery, but they only had a 350-gallon holding tank. It was a lot of work and time to deliver such a small amount of water, and we have the lowest minimum delivery rate in town.

While all the companies around town are at about the same price per gallon, most other companies have an 800-gallon minimum delivery rate, while our minimum at the time was only 500 gallons.

[Boss] and I shared a chuckle over the call; I don’t believe he bothered with calling her back.

When my kids were pretty young — the oldest was four, the middle three, and the youngest six months — I transferred jobs, and my husband and I purchased a used twenty-four-foot travel trailer to live in until we could financially afford to get into an apartment or house in the town near my work.

It was about a week before December, we had been living in the trailer since the beginning of October, and we had already found an apartment to move to but were waiting for December 1st to move in.

My sister (who I always thought had similar views on children and what they should and shouldn’t watch as I did) had allowed my kids to watch the movie “Tremors” while they were at her house, and my kids loved the movie. It made them afraid to go to sleep at night, but that is a different issue we had to work through.

On this particular day, the children couldn’t really play outside much since it was snowing for the first time that season and it had been very cold recently. To entertain themselves, my two oldest children were playing inside on the bed. Their favorite game at the time was one they called “dirt monsters”, which was their phrase for the creatures from the “Tremors” movies. The game consisted of one of the kids being on the bed and the other falling off it and clinging to the side calling the other for help to save them from the dirt monster. The child on the bed would then pull them to safety. Sometimes imaginary guns were involved to shoot the dirt monsters.

After they had played this for quite a while, we ate dinner and then got them ready for bed. We used to sing songs with the kids at bedtime. One song the kids always loved was “Jingle Bells”, but for my sanity, my rule was that we would only sing “Jingle Bells” when there was snow on the ground; otherwise, we would be singing it in the summertime, and that was always kind of weird. So, since there was snow that particular day, we sang a very, very rousing rendition of “Jingle Bells”, practically shouting the last part.

As we sang the very last bit there was a knock on our door. I thought perhaps we were bothering the neighbors with our singing and someone was there to complain. But it was much different. When we opened the door, there were two police officers standing outside. I then thought that we must have really annoyed our neighbors for them to call the police on us with a noise complaint, even though it wasn’t that late — only about 8:00 pm.

The officer was very polite but what he said kind of shocked us. Our neighbors in the RV park had called them, yes, not to report noise, but to report possible child endangerment.

One of our neighbors — we never knew who — heard our children playing dirt monsters and calling for help so they called and informed the police that they heard a child calling for help and that they sounded distressed.

We explained the kids’ game to the officers. I can’t remember all the questions they asked as this was about seventeen years ago now, but I remember that we explained to them that our living situation was temporary and that we were moving in around a week. The kids, who were thrilled that uniformed police officers were there, were crowded around them asking them questions and very much not looking like abused children. The officers then said that they didn’t see any problems and eventually left.

I don’t blame the neighbors that called, especially if they really thought that one of our kids was in danger, but I was confused about how they could hear the kids’ cries for help but not hear their laughter or excited squeals when they were playing. Mainly, I was just so embarrassed because we had five people at the time living in a twenty-four-foot trailer, so it was crowded, cluttered, and chaotic, not to mention that we had just eaten dinner so there were dishes still on the counter. Also, I knew the town newspaper had a police blotter section where they listed all the police calls of the week. It was a small town, and I wasn’t quite sure how extensively they reported the calls and whether our names would be mentioned. (They weren’t.)

It definitely made for a story we had to tell for years about when we got the police called on us. Thankfully, they didn’t decide we were unfit due to the clutter and mess.

I’m a sixteen-year-old male. I work at a pretty big grocery store that sells beer. The catch, however, is that you need a smart serve and must be at least eighteen years old to sell beer.

Most of the time, customers don’t realize this and don’t read the sign to see which lane sells beer and when I tell them this, they either put up a bit of resistance or just move to another line.

It’s about 11 AM on a Sunday morning shift when a father and his daughter who looks to be around four or five years old come into my lane. I don’t realize that they have beer since they have a large cart full of items.

The father acts kind, asking me how I am, and I begin to scan his items. However, I get to the beer and kindly tell him that I cannot scan the beer because I’m not of age and don’t have a smart serve.

This leads to the father getting a little annoyed and after much pushback, makes me call somebody who does have a smart serve to override his beer because his having that six-pack of blue ribbon is just so important.

Somebody comes to override the beer and tells him politely that he should watch out for the beer lane sign next time because the company could get in trouble for a minor selling alcohol.

I kid you not, this guy freaks out and begins to yell, dropping the f-bomb on multiple occasions, going on about how they shouldn’t hire people under eighteen if it will, and all of this other ridiculous crap. All in front of his FOUR-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER.

He then proceeds to call the manager, complaining to him, and then once I finish scanning him out, he grabs the receipt right out of my hand and tells me to go f*** myself.

The manager ended up talking to me after, commending me for the way I handled the situation and we laughed about it.

I worked for a tax preparation office. [Owner] owned four offices. I was typically located in the smallest office, but occasionally, I was placed in a bigger office when they were short-handed.

One such short-handing was rather unusual in nature. [Manager] ran the largest of [Owner]’s offices.

One day, he requested me — or rather he requested “all of our first-years who look good in a suit”, and that included me. Why? To pretend to be lawyers.

One of his senior workers had made a very serious error in a tax return. Somehow, not only was the money directed to the wrong bank, but when the IRS sent the money, the wrong bank kept the money and put it into the account of an unrelated third party.

This created an enormous legal mess. The IRS is NOT supposed to put money in an account without your name on it. There’s a lot that went wrong here.

This turned into meetings of clusters of lawyers — lawyers for the client, for the bank that actually got the money, for the bank that was supposed to get the money, and for the US government.

[Manager] felt… underrepresented. So, he had all of the first-years who looked good in suits dress up like lawyers and hold empty briefcases. There were three of us that he selected: two men and one woman. We were told to stand next to him and keep our mouths shut.

In truth, we didn’t have to do anything. [Manager] had almost no part to play in the event, simply answering about five questions while everyone else argued.

But that was the time I had to be a fake lawyer for my employer.

I work for a government department. We have offices and locations all over the state. I’m based out of a city that’s about a two-and-a-bit-hour train ride to our head office.

At the time, I was working on a team that had members working remotely all across the state, looking after policy, process, and quality assurance. Our old manager had gone and gotten himself promoted for being genuinely brilliant at his role. So, our new manager was hired in from the glorious world of banking, and he was here to “whip us lazy public servants into shape”.

A few days after he began his role, [New Manager] called us all to a teleconference to inform us that he wanted all of us to be at the head office at 8:00 am the next morning for an all-day in-person team meeting. He wanted to see us in “meat space” to “size us up”, understand what we were doing, and see where we “weren’t keeping up with the private sector”.

As I mentioned, due to the nature of the work we were doing, we were all across the state. In-person whole-team meetings were rare, and if they occurred at all, they were booked weeks in advance. We were all adept at video-conferencing LONG before the global health crisis.

Some of us tried to tell our new high-flyer manager that almost none of us were in the same city as he was and that being there on such short notice would mean travel expenses, meal allowances, overtime, etc. He didn’t seem to care, and he told us in no uncertain terms to “just be at the head office tomorrow at 8:00 am” before abruptly hanging up.

Now, I should explain something. I’m one of a handful of union delegates in our department. I know our rules back to front, specifically the sections dealing with travel, allowances, and overtime. So, I engaged malicious compliance mode. If [New Manager] wanted us there, fine, but it’d cost him.

I quickly went about emailing my team what [New Manager] had done by requiring us to be in the head office at 8:00 am and what we had to do.

Because we’d have to travel outside of our normal work hours, our workday clock started ticking the moment we left our homes and only stopped once we got home.

Some of our team travelled overnight. They were entitled to overtime to travel, a dinner allowance, and accommodation for the night, and the same for their return home. As someone travelling in the morning before 7:00 am, I was entitled to a breakfast allowance, lunch allowance, and if I got home after 9:00 pm, a dinner allowance also.

I left my house at 5:00 am to catch the only train that would get me there in time. The train was running slightly behind, but I made it in time. So, the first three hours of my workday were down and I’d done no work.

After a brief period of us introducing ourselves to [New Manager], he proceeded to spend the next four hours telling us about all of the things he’d done at the bank, how he’d made so much money for them, where they’d sent him as a holiday bonus, how we were all stuck in the past in the public service, how the work he’d seen wasn’t up to “private sector standards”, etc. He had all the cocksureness of a finance bro who had always failed upward because others had picked up his slack.

By 3:00 pm, my entire team was in overtime pay territory, and [New Manager] was just warming up with his non-charm offensive. Another three hours went by with [New Manager] verbally patting himself on his back, deeply in love with hearing his own voice, but all I heard was, “Cha-ching! Cha-ching!”

[New Manager] decided that 5:00 pm was a good time to finish up. He stopped mid-sentence, looked at his watch, unceremoniously said, “That’s all for today. Go home now,” and walked out.

After I and a few others gave awkward shrugs to each other, we all packed up and started to make our separate ways home after doing no work all day.

I got to the train station pretty quickly and saw that a train was leaving soon that would get me home around 8:00 pm… or I could catch the all-stations train and get home closer to 9:30 pm. You know what? No matter how fast I could run, I just couldn’t catch that earlier train. D***, I’d just have to catch that all-stations train and be on the clock for another hour and a half, plus have my dinner paid for. Such rotten luck!

I submitted my claims the next day: four and half hours at double rate, my train tickets, my taxi fares to and from the train station, and my breakfast, lunch, and dinner allowances. For me alone, it was close to a $500 expense claim. The rest of my team followed suit and ensured that they claimed everything, too.

[New Manager] tried to fight us on approval for the claims, but he quickly learned that, unlike in the world of banking, most public servants are union, and we’d raise living h*** if he denied our guaranteed allowances.

His all-day [New Manager]-fest symposium blew a good $6,000 hole in his budget. Needless to say, while [New Manager] was our manager, he never required us to attend an in-person meeting again — video-conferencing was just fine.

He only lasted six months before “leaving for new opportunities”.

He just went back to his old job at the bank. Guess he was the one who couldn’t keep up.